The highly controversial indiscriminate child sexual abuse regulation (so-called chat control) could still be endorsed by EU governments after all, as France could give up its previous veto. This is reported by Euractiv and confirmed by internal documents. France considers the new “upload moderation” proposal in principle as a viable option.
Signal recently reaffirmed that they’d rather leave the EU market, than compromise security/privacy. With that they probably couldn’t force them to implement anything, but could force others to stop distribution. So it would e.g. be removed from the playstore. Not sure if they currently do, but they’d likely also need to close any servers they have in the EU. And maybe it would prevent people from donating to them and maybe others that distribute the appn(not using something like crypto to do so).
Hard to imagine how they’d stop distribution of the apk itself through other means, but I guess they could criminalise the use. Which ofc would be pointless like the whole push for chat control itself. It would punish those that just want the privacy/security it offers for legal purposes, and those using it for crime wouldn’t care about it being illegal. And if you’d ban encryption in general, then goodbye to anything related to banking, confidential corporate secrets, and so on. Also naive to think that having any kind of backdoor it would only be used by “the good guys”.
It is a slippery slope. I don’t know how the EU works but in the US a law can be effectively thrown out if the supreme court rules it unconstitutional. Imposing backdoors would be an attack on free speech and would likely not be favored in the courts.
Same thing here, but that doesn’t really stop politicians from trying. And somebody has to challenge it first for that to happen, which also takes time and effort.
Here in Germany we’ve been dealing with a similar situation regarding data retention laws for quite a while now. See wikipedia. It really is quite frustrating.