EU triggers criticism as EU Chat Control vote extends surveillance to 2028

The European Parliament has failed to stop platforms from scanning private messages for child abuse material until 2028 after a motion to reject the rules fell short of the 361 votes required.

The EU’s Chat Control message-scanning regime will continue despite the fact that most lawmakers who cast a ballot want the rules gone.

No private messaging in the EU 

Former MEP and Pirate Party privacy campaigner Patrick Breyer, revealed that during the recent European Parliament vote, 314 members voted against the EU’s chat control rules while 276 backed it.

There were 17 abstentions, and because rejecting the measure needed an absolute majority of the full chamber rather than a simple majority of those present, the 314 opposing votes were not enough.

A separate amendment to limit message scanning to suspects flagged by courts also drew more support than opposition, 322 to 255, and similarly the majority lost.

Due to the outcome of the vote, “Chat Control 1.0,” which was temporarily paused after EU institutions could not agree to extend it, will now be revived. It is a temporary exception that lets U.S. tech firms scan direct messages on services such as Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Gmail and iCloud without a warrant or prior suspicion.

The proposal was brought back for a vote by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP). Parliament President Roberta Metsola, who is an EPP member, asked EU leaders to restart discussions at the last European Council meeting. Four European commissioners also wrote to MEPs, urging them to pass the proposal.

Metsola’s office said she was following a decision made by group leaders, but several lawmakers who worked on the issue said they were not told about this in advance.

Simeon de Brouwer from the digital rights group EDRi told Euractiv that the Parliament had been “backstabbed by its own president.” Rand Hammoud from the Centre for Democracy and Technology Europe said that using the largest political group’s power to force a new vote on a measure that had already failed “should concern anyone who cares about institutional integrity.”

Privacy advocates like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have also campaigned against the measure.

“Fight Chat Control. You cannot make society secure by making people insecure,” Buterin wrote on X in September 2025. He argued that backdoors into private communication are “inevitably hackable.” NFT collector and free-speech advocate 6529 amplified a Buterin post opposing the renewed push on July 8.

Notably, a 2024 draft leaked to French outlet Contexte and flagged by Breyer showed EU interior ministers seeking to exempt the professional accounts of police, military and intelligence staff from the same scanning they wanted to impose on the public.

Buterin says that is evidence that officials know the tools are unreliable.

Why are platforms scanning messages?

The regulation, formally the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was proposed by then-Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson in May 2022. Supporters, including the Commission’s own home affairs directorate, argue that voluntary detection by platforms leaves gaps and that the EU relies too heavily on the United States to flag abuse happening inside the bloc.

Opponents counter that scanning everyone’s messages amounts to mass surveillance. The Council of the EU’s own legal service has warned that the approach conflicts with the right to privacy, and a European Parliament study concluded there is no way to detect abuse material at scale without a high rate of false positives.

Breyer cited German federal police figures showing that 48% of alerts are not criminally relevant in the first place, and pointed to EU Commission data indicating scanning of private chats produced only 36% of abuse reports in 2024.

Breyer called the result “a farce” that “damages democracy,” but said the fight over a permanent version was “just getting started.” A symbolic carve-out was added for encrypted chats, though, as Breyer noted, services like WhatsApp were never scanned to begin with.

Talks on the permanent framework, called Chat Control 2.0, resume in September.