As of March 2026, the European Commission has invited input on the Google Android Developer Verification requirements to monitor Google’s compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). With the first official review of the DMA due by 3 May 2026, the Commission has launched a public consultation, a “Call for Evidence,” to evaluate how this requirement impacts fair and contestable digital markets.

In response, the European Pirate Party has submitted a formal contribution to the Commission’s review, raising concerns about the implications of Google’s new requirements. The Party has also joined 37 organisations in signing an open letter, published by the F-Droid team in February 2026, calling on Google to reconsider an initiative that risks turning Android into a centrally controlled ecosystem rather than an open platform for all developers.

An Overview of the new regulation/requirement:

The Android developer verification requirement is a new mandate rolled out by Google that requires app developers, including those distributing apps outside the Google Play Store, to verify their identities to remain installable on Android devices.

Google has justified this move as a security measure, comparing it to identity checks in high-risk environments. The aim, according to the company, is to prevent bad actors from anonymously distributing malware or scams.

Core Requirements:

• Identity Verification:
  
  • Individuals: Must provide a legal name, address, email, phone number, and a government-issued photo ID (passport or driver’s license).
  • Organizations: Must provide their legal business name, physical address, and a D-U-N-S number.

  
  

• App Registration: Developers must register their app’s “package name” (e.g., com.example.app) and use their signing keys to prove they are the rightful owners of the software.
• Cost: A one-time $25 registration fee for a Google Play Console account is required for verification. There are no additional or recurring fees involved.

Key Timelines:

• March 2026 – Verification portals open globally for developers.
• September 2026 – The regulation will be enforced in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Unverified apps will be blocked from installation.
• 2027 and beyond – The regulation will be rolled out globally.

What do critics say?

A coalition of more than 37 civil society groups, digital rights activists, and technology companies has launched the “Keep Android Open” campaign. F-Droid, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Article 19, Fastmail, Vivaldi, etc., are among the participants, along with the European Pirate Party.

The central concern raised by these organisations is that mandatory verification risks turning Android into a controlled ecosystem.

Key Concerns:

• Destruction of “True” Sideloading: Critics argue that requiring registration for apps distributed outside the Play Store undermines true independent sideloading. While Google maintains that sideloading remains possible, opponents say it will be subject to friction and warnings that discourage users.
• Privacy and Surveillance Risks: Mandatory registration requires developers to provide Google with legal names, home addresses, and government-issued IDs. Critics argue this creates a global database of all Android developers, even those who intentionally avoid Google’s ecosystem for privacy reasons.
• Barrier to Entry for Open Source (FOSS): Many free and open-source projects rely on anonymous volunteer contributors who may be unwilling or unable to provide government IDs or pay the $25 registration fee. F-Droid has explicitly stated that this requirement could be “existential” for its project.
• Anti-Competitive “Gatekeeping”: Opponents contend that Google is using security as a pretext to maintain its monopoly. By requiring verification, Google can collect business intelligence on all Android development activity, even apps that compete directly with Google’s own services.
• Arbitrary Enforcement and “Account Kill-Switch”: There are fears that Google could use this system to arbitrarily block developers or revoke their “verified” status without a clear appeals process, effectively turning off their apps across all devices.
• Economic Impact on Emerging Markets: While $25 may be minor in some regions, critics note that it is a significant barrier for students and hobbyists in developing countries.

European Pirate Party’s Perspective:

As an advocate of digital rights, internet freedom, and online privacy, the European Pirate Party’s motivation to respond to the Commission’s call and join the “Keep Android Open” campaign stems from a unique perspective. The experts view the issue as an intersection of three points:

1. Free software and the open ecosystem
2. Civil liberties and the right to privacy
3. Competition law under the Digital Markets Act

Each dimension reinforces each other and calls for regulatory intervention.

Building on these concerns, the Party’s submission to the European Commission outlines how the verification requirement risks undermining the principles the DMA is designed to protect. It calls for proportionate and transparent measures that ensure security without restricting innovation, limiting anonymity, or distorting competition.

For the complete analysis and supporting recommendations, please refer to the attached document:

EPP Google Android Developer Verification policy paperDownload

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Section 702 of FISA, the controversial surveillance law that allows the FBI and intelligence agencies to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant, is up for renewal in Congress. The law has been repeatedly misused, including to monitor journalists and activists. Yet, the Trump administration and some Democratic lawmakers are pushing Congress to reauthorize Section 702 without significant changes.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) recently spoke to four experts about Section 702: Dell Cameron, an investigative reporter for Wired who covers privacy and national security; John Dickas, Sen. Ron Wyden’s deputy chief of staff; Trevor Timm, executive director of FPF; and Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress.

We talked about how surveillance affects freedom of the press and other First Amendment rights, and how Section 702 should be reformed to help limit the government’s power to spy on Americans.

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Vitka emphasized how the government has overreached using Section 702 powers, highlighting examples of spying on Black Lives Matter protesters, elected officials, and judges. “When the executive branch gets to decide who they’re spying on and at what degree they can spy on them on its own, they inevitably do too much,” Vitka said. “They do things that chill our speech.”

Vitka said that Congress should not reauthorize the law without requiring a warrant before the government can search data collected under Section 702 for Americans’ communications. Congress must also close the “data broker loophole,” Vitka said, which currently allows the FBI and other agencies to buy data on Americans that they otherwise would require a warrant to access.

Timm, too, explained that Section 702 surveillance can be abused, including in ways that impact the press. “A journalist’s lifeblood is their ability to keep their sources safe and confidential from government intrusion or any other control, any other intrusion,” Timm explained. “If the government is able to vacuum up, for example, all of a journalist’s international contacts and communications, they would essentially be able to find out who all their international sources are, despite the fact that a journalist was completely complying with the law and just doing their job as they are allowed to under the First Amendment.”

Cameron highlighted his reporting about the government’s systemic noncompliance with the law when it comes to Section 702, noting that even the FISA court that oversees the program has cited the FBI for “persistent and widespread violations” in the past. Meanwhile, internal mechanisms intended to monitor the FBI and other agencies have been dismantled, Cameron said.

A lack of transparency and secret government interpretations of the law also make it difficult for journalists to report on it, and for lawmakers and the public to understand how Section 702 is being used.

Cameron noted his recent report for Wired on a letter from lawmakers, including Wyden, to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, asking her to clarify whether Americans using virtual private networks are vulnerable to spying under Section 702. It’s important to remember, Cameron said, that Section 702 is “being used in ways that we can’t really calculate, can’t understand, maybe never will.”

Dickas discussed Wyden’s efforts to protect Americans’ privacy and call attention to secret executive branch interpretations of Section 702 that have expanded the government’s surveillance power in the past. “Senator Wyden agrees that there is value to American’s national security in Section 702, but he’s also arguing pretty vociferously that it’s possible to make reforms to protect the privacy of Americans that do not diminish Section 702 national security value,” Dickas said.

A bill co-sponsored by Wyden and a bipartisan group of senators, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, would reauthorize Section 702 while also making urgently needed reforms to the law, Dickas explained.

Watch the full conversation here.

You can tell your lawmaker not to renew Section 702 without including privacy reforms for Americans using FPF’s action center.

You can tell Congress to close the data broker loophole and stop AI-powered mass surveillance here.

freedom.press/issues/protectin…

Prior restraints, or court orders prohibiting journalists from publishing news, are the “most serious” violations of the First Amendment, according to the Supreme Court. The Pentagon Papers case famously held that gagging the press is unconstitutional, even when the government claimed that The New York Times and The Washington Post reporting the secret history of its Vietnam War lies leaked by Daniel Ellsberg would damage national security.

But what if the Nixon administration had gone about it differently? Rather than seeking such an extreme judicial remedy, it could have had federal agents barge into the Times’ and Post’s newsrooms, seize the Pentagon Papers and all other national defense documents in the papers’ custody, whether from Ellsberg or another source entirely, and refuse to return any of them, claiming they’re all criminal “contraband” because the newspapers had violated the Espionage Act of 1917 by obtaining them.

There would have been no need for a prior restraint — no matter what your legal rights might be on paper, you can’t publish what you don’t possess. As one federal appellate court said in 2015, “The government need not ban a protected activity … if it can simply proceed upstream and dam the source.”

Over half a century after the Pentagon Papers, the federal government apparently believes it can do just that. In January, it raided the home of Post journalist Hannah Natanson, purportedly to investigate whether one of her alleged sources — government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones — broke the law by leaking documents to her.

Even a targeted operation would have been problematic enough — it violates federal law for the government to seize journalists’ materials to investigate their sources’ alleged crimes. That law, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, arose from the seizure of a few pictures taken by reporters for The Stanford Daily of a confrontation between police and protesters.

That raid seems quaint now. In Natanson’s case, the government seized terabytes of data, most of which had nothing to do with that investigation. It’s claiming that it doesn’t have to return any classified information found in her files because it’s “contraband,” like drug money or illegal guns at a crime scene.

Although it hasn’t charged Natanson with a crime, the Department of Justice contends that she, along with her source, violated the Espionage Act by possessing classified documents (the Espionage Act is actually not even limited to classified records, since the classification system didn’t exist yet when it was enacted).

Next time federal prosecutors attempt their new censorship workaround, the judiciary needs to send a strong signal that news isn’t an ill-gotten gain.

Prosecutors also cited the alleged Espionage Act violation to excuse their noncompliance with the Privacy Protection Act, although they didn’t bother to share that reasoning with the judge until he called them out for their omission.

The Department of War (it’s earned the name at this point) has taken it even further, claiming it’s criminal solicitation not only for journalists to obtain leaked documents but to merely ask questions to Pentagon personnel who aren’t officially authorized to answer them.

District Judge Paul Friedman struck down the Pentagon’s press restrictions as unconstitutional March 20 in a lawsuit brought by the Times, but the Pentagon reissued them with hardly any substantive changes and promised to appeal the ruling against the original policy. Does that mean they think they can seize interview recordings from journalists, label them fruits of a forbidden tree, and keep them forever?

Of course, people should be outraged at the Trump administration for all of this. But, unfortunately, this contraband nonsense didn’t originate with Trump.

During the Biden administration, federal prosecutors floated a strikingly similar theory in the prosecution of Tim Burke, a Florida journalist, known for breaking the Manti Teʻo catfishing story back in 2013, who was charged with computer crimes for obtaining unaired outtakes of antisemitic rants by Ye (formerly Kanye West) during an interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The most serious charges against Burke have been dismissed, but the government is appealing.

The government argued in Burke’s case, like in Natanson’s, that other materials having nothing to do with the investigation at hand could be permanently confiscated from Burke because they may constitute “contraband” from unspecified computer crimes. No judge has determined that any illegality occurred in either case, but both journalists have been restrained from pursuing countless stories because they simply don’t have their work.

In Natanson’s case, the notion that a journalist or publisher can violate the Espionage Act by obtaining government secrets in the first place is a red line that many administrations decided against crossing in prior decades. It was legitimized by the Biden administration’s extraction of a plea deal from WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange over his publication in 2010 of documents that exposed war crimes and abuses during the Iraq War, despite warnings from leading newspapers, law professors, and other First Amendment advocates.

And now that reasoning is apparently being extended to not just obtaining leaked documents but asking questions to anyone but a PR flack.

This contraband nonsense didn’t originate with Trump.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has introduced an excellent bill to rein in Espionage Act abuses — named after Ellsberg, whose own prosecution was thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct. And Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint have new legislation to plug the holes in the Privacy Protection Act that allow illegal raids to slip through the cracks of the judicial system. But things are moving quickly. The bills are unlikely to advance before the administration does more damage.

The Pentagon Papers case stands for the proposition that the government cannot suppress the publication of truthful information of public concern, even when it would very much like to. The contraband theory is an attempt to achieve the suppression indirectly — by redefining journalists’ work product as something illicit that the government can confiscate.

Courts shouldn’t let it get that far. In the Natanson case, Judge William Porter in February rightly referred to the seizure of Natanson’s materials as a prior restraint. But he didn’t order them immediately returned, and he didn’t sanction federal prosecutors for making such absurd legal arguments (or for failing to disclose the Privacy Protection Act).

Next time federal prosecutors attempt their new censorship workaround, the judiciary needs to send a strong signal that news isn’t an ill-gotten gain and prior restraints in any form won’t be tolerated in this nation’s courthouses.

Judge Friedman will soon have the opportunity to do just that. The Times has filed a motion to compel the Pentagon to comply with his order to stop retaliating against journalists for doing their jobs, referring to the government’s conduct as “the definition of contempt.” Friedman should show the government the definition of sanctions.

freedom.press/issues/the-doj-t…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

A new bill would put some bite behind the federal law that’s supposed to protect journalists from search warrants. Tell your member of Congress to support it, and while you’re at it, tell them to pass the Daniel Ellsberg Act, too. Then keep reading for more press freedom news, including the latest on how petty Pete Hegseth is recycling old ideas to stifle the Pentagon press corps.

Tell Congress to stop newsroom raids

Just a few months ago, the government raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home based on a search warrant that failed to mention the Privacy Protection Act, the federal law that’s supposed to stop most search warrants targeting journalists.

Natanson’s case isn’t the only one involving a journalist where the government has conveniently omitted the law. A new bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint could help end this troubling pattern.

The Wyden-Balint bill is needed now more than ever, and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is proud to endorse it. Read about why the bill is necessary and tell your member of Congress to support it today.

• Take action

Meet the new Pentagon press policy, same as the old Pentagon press policy

After a federal judge struck down the Pentagon’s media access policy last week in litigation brought by The New York Times, the Defense Department enacted a new policy that retains the same core constitutional problem as the original one — it allows the government to deny reporters press passes merely for asking questions. The Times has moved to compel the Pentagon to follow the judge’s ruling, calling its conduct “the definition of contempt.”

We said in a statement, “It’s past time that this administration, its officials, and its lawyers start facing real consequences for ignoring court orders and the Constitution.”

• Read our statement

Pentagon claims asking questions is a crime

In 2017, rogue police officers in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal for asking government officials questions. They were rightly ridiculed, although the Supreme Court this week declined to review an awful ruling preventing Villarreal from suing them. But they were also apparently ahead of their time.

As FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern explained in The Intercept, it’s now the federal government’s position that asking “unauthorized” questions is illegal. Court filings imply that the Pentagon believes journalists who ask unauthorized questions are not only subject to revocation of press passes, but to criminal prosecution.

• Read the article

FOIA sets a floor for transparency, not a ceiling

Our Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, Lauren Harper, wrote for MS Now about the Pentagon’s insulting justification for its restrictions on newsgathering: That journalists have “legitimate” alternatives, like Freedom of Information Act requests.

As Harper explains, FOIA is broken across the government, but especially at the Pentagon, and even more so during this administration. Even when it’s working, the law is intended to guarantee a minimum level of transparency, not be an exclusive means of obtaining news.

• Read more

Government thinks First Amendment isn’t for immigrant journalists

The government made an alarming claim in response to Nashville journalist Estefany Rodríguez’s contention that her immigration arrest was in retaliation for exercising her First Amendment rights: That she doesn’t have any.

FPF Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus explains that the reason that sounds so obviously wrong is because it is.

• Read more

Watch our recent events

We participated in two important discussions this week, and you can check out both online if you missed them. Harper moderated a panel hosted by the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy on the Trump administration’s escalating attacks against press freedom. And FPF hosted a conversation about current efforts to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without reforms to prevent illegal surveillance of communications by Americans, including journalists.

You can also use our action center to tell Congress not to renew Section 702 without reforms. And you can find the rest of our panel discussions, as well as our short videos about press freedom topics in the news, on our YouTube page.

• Watch more

What we’re reading

Trump isn’t just bullying journalists. He’s subverting the First Amendment

Truthout
“Any Republican official who is vocal about Biden’s jawboning but silent now is someone who probably doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to principled application of the First Amendment,” Stern said.

Kara Swisher would cut ties with CNN if Ellisons took control

The Hollywood Reporter
“They have no interest in journalism,” Swisher said, “I’m not working for you hacks.” Paramount will tank CNN to appease Trump, just like it did CBS. Its shareholders should be objecting loudly to further public humiliation and devaluation.

Who tells the story? And whose story is it? Values and practices when reporting on ICE

Transom
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies ignore press rights, editors, unions, and lawyers must be willing to step up to support journalists, FPF’s Deputy Director of Advocacy Adam Rose explained. “If you’re prevented from telling the story, then you are the story,” he said.

Trump leverages Army-Navy game to ramp up pressure on broadcasters

Politico
Maybe station owners who didn’t want to rock the boat when Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to censor the news will grow a spine now that they’re messing with real money.

freedom.press/issues/tell-cong…

A new bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint could help end a troubling pattern of law enforcement officers getting permission from judges to search and seize a journalist’s materials without telling courts about a federal law designed to prevent exactly that.

The Privacy Protection Updates Act would provide some much-needed teeth to the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, a federal law that forbids the government from using search warrants in most cases to raid newsrooms or journalists’ homes, or seize their equipment. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) strongly endorses the bill.

Just a few months ago, the government raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home based on a search warrant that failed to mention the Privacy Protection Act. Although a judge later rebuked assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Kromberg for that omission, prosecutors and the government have faced few real consequences so far.

Natanson’s case is at least the sixth in recent years where authorities seeking a search warrant against a member of the press failed to inform the court about the act. In some past instances, they didn’t even tell the court that the target was a journalist.

A look back at these cases shows that unless Congress strengthens the Privacy Protection Act by passing Wyden and Balint’s new bill, the law will continue to fail the very journalists it is meant to protect.

Marion County Record

In 2023, police in Marion County, Kansas, raided the Marion County Record newsroom and the home of co-owners Eric and Joan Meyers. Officers did not alert the judge who signed off on the warrant to the Privacy Protection Act. Joan Meyers, who was 98, died the day after the raid on her house.

After the national backlash to the raid, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody claimed he knew about the act but argued that it doesn’t apply when journalists “are suspects in the offense that is the subject of the search.”

But because Cody never made that argument to the judge, a court never had the chance to evaluate it. If it had, it would have rejected it. The act’s “suspect exception” does not permit searches when the “offense” police are investigating consists of the “receipt, possession, communication, or withholding” of the material sought, which was precisely the case with the Record.

Prosecutors eventually withdrew the warrant, and the county later paid $3 million to settle lawsuits brought as a result of the search — but only after the damage was done.

Bryan Carmody

In 2019, San Francisco police searched journalist Bryan Carmody’s home, office, and phone records while trying to identify his confidential source. They did not tell the judges who authorized the search warrants about the Privacy Protection Act, or that Carmody was a journalist with a press pass issued by the police department.

As a result, Carmody awoke one morning to police using a sledgehammer to try to break down his door, before he was detained for hours and questioned by the FBI while the search was carried out.

All of the search warrants against Carmody were later ruled illegal, and the city paid him a $369,000 settlement and agreed to ensure its employees were aware of internal policies concerning warrants to journalists.

Indybay

Just five years later, however, the San Francisco Police Department again failed to disclose the Privacy Protection Act in a search warrant targeting the independent news outlet Indybay. It also didn’t mention California’s shield law, which also protects journalists from certain compelled disclosures.

Police obtained the search warrant to compel Indybay to turn over electronic information in an effort to identify the author of a post on its community-sourced newswire who claimed to have vandalized the San Francisco Police Credit Union, and it gagged Indybay from talking about it. With help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Indybay successfully fought off the demand.

Tim Burke

The FBI raided the home office of journalist Tim Burke in 2023 as part of a criminal investigation into alleged computer crimes, after news outlets posted outtakes from a Fox News interview showing recording artist Ye, formerly Kanye West, making antisemitic comments. Burke has since been charged with federal crimes for accessing the outtakes, which he shared with news outlets. Burke denies the charges.

The government obtained a search warrant for the raid, but in its warrant application described Burke as a media consultant, not a journalist. It also never informed the court that the Privacy Protection Act arguably applied to the search, or of any exceptions to the law on which the government relied.

Burke objected to the search for its failure to disclose his status as a reporter and omission of the PPA, as well as on other grounds, and asked for evidence seized from the raid to be suppressed. A federal court rejected his motion, however, noting that even if the act applied, the remedy for violations of the law did not include suppression of evidence.

Pablo Unzueta, Julianna Lacoste, and Hugo Padilla

In 2020, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department obtained search warrants for the devices of two journalists, Pablo Unzueta and Julianna Lacoste, and one livestreamer, Hugo Padilla. The three were arrested while covering a protest, and all three were identifiable as members of the press by markings on their clothing or their press credentials.

When seeking the search warrants, police did not tell the court that the three were journalists or engaged in dissemination of information to the public, according to records unsealed after a court battle led by the First Amendment Coalition. Police also did not mention the Privacy Protection Act or the California shield law.

A later lawsuit by Unzueta resulted in a $90,000 settlement.

The Wyden-Balint measure can help fix the law

The government’s repeated failure to tell courts the full story when seeking search warrants against journalists or others engaged in the dissemination of information to the public shows just how necessary the Privacy Protection Act Updates Act is.

The new bill would help fix these problems by requiring the government to explicitly disclose and prove the exceptions to the law it wants to rely on to justify a search warrant to courts. Courts must also ensure that those exceptions are applied consistently with the First Amendment. These are extremely important changes that should prohibit a repeat of the Natanson case.

The bill would also provide that any evidence obtained in violation of the Privacy Protection Act cannot be used in any investigation, court proceeding, or other official proceedings. This exclusionary rule is a stronger deterrent than the act’s current remedy, which allows only for monetary damages when the law is violated.

Finally, the bill would ensure that the government can’t sidestep its protections when it targets information stored in the cloud by journalists and others who disseminate information to the public.

With these fixes, Congress can ensure that the Privacy Protection Act effectively prohibits search warrants targeting journalists, a protection that is needed now more than ever. Judges can’t enforce a law they don’t know applies, and a free press can’t function if reporters fear surprise raids on their newsrooms and homes.

freedom.press/issues/new-bill-…

Brussels, 27.03.2026 – In an interesting turn of events, amid a closely contested vote on 26.03.2026, the European Parliament has rejected the regulations proposed by the Chat Control 1.0 framework, marking a significant victory for digital rights advocates across Europe.

The outcome followed two critical votes that revealed both the political tensions and the Parliament’s ultimate stance on surveillance measures.

In the initial round of voting held on 11 March 2026, the European Parliament rejected indiscriminate monitoring practices as part of efforts to protect children online. However, in a subsequent procedural move initiated by conservative parties, a key amendment was removed. This amendment had restricted the scope of Chat Control 1.0 and introduced safeguards to limit intrusive monitoring. Its removal marked a concerning setback for privacy protections.

In a striking turn of events, the second and decisive vote on the amended parliamentary position led to the complete rejection of Chat Control 1.0. Without the necessary safeguards in place, a majority of Members of the European Parliament refused to endorse the proposal. The result was decided by a narrow margin of just one vote, underscoring the significance of every parliamentary voice and public intervention.

This outcome represents a clear rejection of indiscriminate and automated monitoring of private communications under unverified suspicion. It sends a strong signal that measures which risk undermining fundamental rights, including the privacy of communications and the integrity of end-to-end encryption, will not gain democratic approval without robust safeguards.

Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) commented:
“This historic day brings tears of joy! The EU Parliament has buried Chat Control – a massive, hard-fought victory for the unprecedented resistance of civil society and citizens! The fact that a single vote tipped the scales against the extremely error-prone text and image search shows: Every single vote in Parliament and every call from concerned citizens counted!

We have stopped a broken and illegal system. Once our investigators are no longer drowning in a flood of false and long-known suspicion reports from the US, resources will finally be freed up to hunt down organized abuse rings in a targeted and covert manner. Trying to protect children with mass surveillance is like desperately trying to mop up the floor while leaving the faucet running. We must finally turn off the tap! This means genuine child protection through a paradigm shift: Providers must technically prevent cybergrooming from the outset through secure app design. Illegal material on the internet must be proactively tracked down and deleted directly at the source. That is what truly protects children.

But beware, we can only celebrate briefly today: They will try again. The negotiations for a permanent Chat Control regulation are continuing under high pressure, and soon the planned age verification for messengers threatens to end anonymous communication on the internet. The fight for digital freedom must go on!”

The decision reinforces the European Parliament’s role as a critical check in ensuring that efforts to combat online harms remain proportionate, targeted, and respectful of fundamental rights.

As discussions continue around future proposals, including the broader “Chat Control 2.0” framework, policymakers are urged to pursue solutions that effectively protect children while upholding the principles of privacy, security, and the rule of law.

The voting results mark a turning point: not the end of the debate, but a clear demand for better, rights-respecting legislation.

Press & Media Contact

Contact for inquiries:
Kalpana (Press Officer)
kalpana.vogeti@europeanpirates.eu

europeanpirates.eu/eu-parliame…