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by general1465 206 days ago
> I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.

That's because lawmakers think it has no impact on them. In Czech Republic a transparency law has been passed many years ago. This law effectively said that cities needs to disclose suppliers and agreements for services they are purchasing, like trash collection. Sounds pretty innocent.

It has turned out that politicians did not think that through because people found a lot of cities are buying services from companies which are owned by politicians who are also part of city council. Whoops, massive conflict of interests. So then politicians were clamping the law down until this got hidden under wraps again. All these Chat Controls, porn filters are going to have exactly same effect.
1 comments
HeavyStorm 206 days ago
Do they? You mention something that affects politicians negatively much more than affect civilians. Chat control will be negative for _all_ of us, mainly of innocents, while bad actors will switch to other means of communication that evades the law.
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general1465 206 days ago
Technically you can just setup a political party and then offer membership in the party for a yearly fee like 100EUR - every member will automatically become a politician and thus won't be allowed to be tracked because that's literal exception in the Chat Control. If government will want to track them, it will need to expand tracking to themselves too, which they definitely don't want to do.

So now government is not allowed to track you and you can also make quite a lot of money out of this stupid law.

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port11 204 days ago
If this is true, I'll owe you a beer. Or 50.

But honestly, if it were that simple wouldn't they think of it? Say, "only applies to politicians with a seat in parliament"?

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general1465 204 days ago
They did not think it through like usually. Politician will get to the big established party through connections or through wealth. So in their minds, normal pleb can't become a politician without connections or wealth.

And picking up only elected officials would piss of their own party again. Problem is that only fraction of party is elected, so they would be committing a friendly fire again.

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