Humanius

I would still recommend tweaking the provided text a little to be more personal to you, but it’s a really good baseline to work from.

Once again I will post the following link:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

I will keep posting this link whenever Chat Control shows its ugly head again.

Any specific reason why they should be phones older than 2020?

Hypothetically the police could come with a warrant and force you to hand over the footage you recorded. It’s a higher barrier than if footage is being uploaded to the cloud, but it can still happen.

And even if the cameras are not uploading their footage to the cloud, it still wouldn’t sit well with me if every other house has a camera pointed at the public street

Where I live it is technically illegal to record the public street with an automated camera, but it’s not really being enforced. So there is Ring cameras everywhere.

Yes, but it’ll take them another ten years

It’s a BBC article, so it stands to reason that this is about the UK government.

I’m no expert, but I believe this is down to the individual member states.

In my country (the NL) it is technically not allowed to film the public street with an automated camera, which effectively makes Ring and equivalents illegal to install in most places

Practically this is not really enforced though, so you see them everywhere anyway.

From the coverage that I read in my national newspaper (which admittedly isn’t Slovakian) the speed limit applies to everyone on the sidewalk. Not just to e-bikes and e-scooters, but also to pedestrians.

The speed limit is set to 6 km/h. Joggers and people making a sprint to catch a bus, would easily be breaking that speed limit.

To my knowledge, there are designs which allow you to pop out the latch without the need for electronics.

However, if I’m reading the article correctly those wouldn’t be allowed either because in their default state they don’t have “enough room for a hand to grip behind them”. That wording alone explicitely bans flush doorhandles, and not just electronic doorhandles

The countries that oppose Chat Control are:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Czechia
• Finland
• Germany
• Luxemburg
• Netherlands
• Poland

Supporters are:

• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Denmark
• France
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden

All other countries are currently undecided

Source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Contact your representatives and tell them they should oppose Chat Control. The link above lists who they are and provides some templates for emails you could send them

From my understanding a significant portion of asylum claims in Europe came from Syrian refugees.

In December of 2024 the former Syrian president Assad was deposed and the country has (seemingly) gotten a lot more stable since. So it makes sense that asylum claims would be down in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024.

This is a good development. Not only does it mean that people will be able to go home in relative safety, it also takes away a lot of the ammunition (the fallout from the refugee crisis that has been ongoing since 2015) that the right-wing populists and fascists all over Europe have been using to gain power.

I’m at the “I’d like to ditch Windows, but whenever I try another Linux distro there are too many little issues really consider it a viable alternative” stage.

Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification

On a side-note. I do not consider the government to be a trusted party. Whatever solution gets implemented needs to not provide the government any information that they can use for mass surveillance.

The two main requirements in my view are:

• The website that needs your age shouldn’t get to know your identity. They only get to verify your age.
• The government age verification shouldn’t get to know what service you are requesting access for. They only provide age verification.

Edit: You mention the certificate being short-lived, but one of the concerns mentioned in the proposed implementation for the EU age verification states that if that window is too short it can be used to determine identity.

While I agree that the cost of operation and yield are a valid concern, the same argument could have been used against renewable energies like wind and solar only 30 to 40 years ago.

The price of these energy sources has come down a lot since, for a large part thanks to the modern day widespread use. We have a lot of experience generating power this way which drives down cost, and increases yield.

Novel techniques like the one described in the article don’t yet benefit from that experience and scale. And if we don’t try new things every now and then they never will.

That is not to say all novel techniques will be equally fruitful, but if you don’t occasionally try new things you will never learn.

Edit: Misspelled “energy” as “energie”

I’m currently using Ecosia as well, because they are working together with Qwant on a European search index. I want to support that.

The article speculates that the increase in pedestrian deaths is due to e-bikes and e-scooters. I’m not convinced that this speculation is based on actual data though.

After a bit of digging I found a government resource on road fatalities:
https://catalogue.data.infrastructure.gov.au/dataset/australian-road-deaths-database

This data does not seem to track the vehicle that caused the road fatality, unless that vehicle is a bus, heavy-rigid truck, or articulated truck. So there would be no way to determine from the data available whether the increase in fatalities is due to e-bikes and e-scooters.

Republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive…

Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.

They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.

And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.

Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.

I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.

I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.

If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.

Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs

Instead it might be more helpful to directly contact your representatives.

This website can help you figure out who they are, and help formulate an email send to them:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

(Obviously it is best to write your own response, or at least update the text to be your own, but it could be a good springboard)