The new draft law in the EU is in the trialogue phase, so it is currently being discussed at the level of the Council of the EU, the European Parliament and the European Commission. At the same time, it counts on scanning all conversations conducted through chat applications such as WhatsApp or Messenger. Currently, it is a compromise.
Under the current version of Chat Control, i.e. the 2021 ePrivacy exemption, companies can scan conversations for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but they are not required to. The new version, sometimes called version 2.0, would change that – all companies would have to prevent the distribution of material depicting child sexual abuse.
The obligation to remove such content and block access to it would be imposed on them by national authorities. If they did not do so, they could be fined.
In the survey, the agency asked Czechs several questions related to Chat Control and freedom of speech. When asked how communication monitoring tools should be used, 66 percent of respondents said that only based on a court order, 15.7 percent thought that they should be used across the board, and 18.3 percent said that they did not know.
The survey also sought people’s views on whether identity verification could threaten freedom of expression. The draft of the new version of Chat Control includes various forms of age or identity verification for some online services, which, according to critics, can limit anonymity on the Internet.
The answers show that exactly half of Czechs are not worried about restrictions on freedom of speech, while 39.7 percent are.
The Czechs are the most negative about the fact that the state could abuse the widespread monitoring of communications. While only 23.6 percent definitely or rather trust that the state would not do so, 65.2 percent fear the opposite.
The Perfect Crowd agency conducted the survey from February 26 to March 5. It was attended by 803 people from all regions of the Czech Republic and of various age categories.
Pirates are against it
Czech politicians are mostly against the proposal. “Mass surveillance of innocent citizens is a practice of the previous regime, which the Czechs remember very well,” said pirate MEP Markéta Gregorová for Fairpress, who wants it not to pass in the European Parliament.
