Signal calls on Germany to vote against ‘Chat Control,’ saying it would leave EU market

The president of the Signal Foundation on Friday said the end-to-end encrypted messaging app will leave the European Union market rather than comply with a potential new regulation known as Chat Control.

Chat Control, first introduced in 2022, would require service providers, including end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal, to scan all platform communications and files to screen for “abusive material” before a message is sent. 

The measure, which is designed to protect children and had been tabled, is now under consideration again with a key vote coming on October 14. 

Germany has a swing vote and while officials there had long opposed the measure, a new coalition government has reportedly refused to say whether it will support Chat Control. 

Denmark, which now holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union, strongly favors Chat Control and has been pushing a vote forward.

“Under the guise of protecting children, the latest Chat Control proposals would require mass scanning of every message, photo, and video on a person’s device, assessing these via a government-mandated database or AI model to determine whether they are permissible content or not,” Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker said in a Friday blog post. 

“What they propose is in effect a mass surveillance free-for-all, opening up everyone’s intimate and confidential communications, whether government officials, military, investigative journalists, or activists,” she added.

Scanning messages before they are sent could allow hackers and nation state adversaries to easily “piggyback” onto the access provided to the system, Whittaker said.

Breaking encryption would also risk the confidentiality of messaging between government officials and intelligence officers, she said, jeopardizing national security.

A “backdoor” to one part of an encrypted network is a “vector into every other part,” Whittaker said in the blog post. 

“We will not compromise the integrity of our service, or endanger the safety of the people who rely on us around the world, often in contexts where private communications are the difference between life and death,” she wrote. “If we were given a choice between building a surveillance machine into Signal or leaving the market, we would leave the market.”