Chat Control, in plain words

It's the name for the European rules that allow, or seek to impose, automated scanning of private messages to find child sexual abuse material and the grooming of minors. There are two: 1.0, in force, and 2.0, still under discussion.

GiBSeS — Naisho has no automated content scanning of any kind.

It's an exception to the ePrivacy Directive that allows chat, email and messaging providers to scan messages on a voluntary basis. It is not an obligation. Introduced in 2021, it expired on 3 April 2026 and was left without a legal basis until July. Now Reg. (EU) 2026/1881 puts it back in force until 3 April 2028, excluding end-to-end encrypted communications.

It's a regulation proposed by the Commission in May 2022. In its original version it required providers to detect content on the authorities' orders, private chats included. The Council's position of November 2025 drops the obligation, but makes “voluntary” scanning permanent and plans to reassess the obligation within 3 years.

No. As of 29 October 2026, Parliament, Council and Commission are still negotiating. On 29 September 2026 there was no agreement on scanning private communications; an attempt at a political agreement is expected between November and December.

On 9 July 2026, in the European Parliament, 314 MEPs voted to reject the extension of voluntary scanning and 276 to keep it. The extension passed anyway, because at second reading rejecting a text requires an absolute majority of sitting MEPs: 360 votes. It became Reg. (EU) 2026/1881.

Today end-to-end encrypted chats are excluded from voluntary scanning. Critics fear the next step: with scanning made permanent and services required to “mitigate risk”, the only way to check an encrypted chat would be to look at the message on your phone, before it's sent.

GiBSeS — With Naisho, messages go through a computer belonging to your community, which can't read them and doesn't analyse them.

Yes, both use end-to-end encryption. The real question is a different one: what can be imposed before encryption, and where the information about who writes to whom, and when, ends up. Signal has said publicly that it would leave Europe rather than weaken its encryption.

Yes. In 2020 the Irish police received 4,192 reports: 471 were false positives. In Germany, in 2024, almost half of the 205,728 reports received by the federal police had no criminal relevance: not all of them machine errors, but all of them messages that ended up in front of the police.

Because an automated system doesn't know you have nothing to hide. It sees the photo of your child at the beach, the medical report, the late-night rant, and it decides on its own. And because a way into messages created for a good reason stays open to anyone who uses it for other reasons. According to the European data protection authorities, the proposal risked becoming the basis for generalised scanning of all communications.

Yes, according to more than 500 cryptographers and researchers from 34 countries. In their letter of September 2025 they explain that scanning encrypted chats means weakening their security, and that automatically recognising new content is technically infeasible without a huge number of errors.

Naisho is designed to comply with Chat Control 1.0 and with what is currently expected for Chat Control 2.0, or whatever it ends up being called. Rules change and depend on where you are: it's up to users to check the rules in force in their own jurisdiction.

On 26 November 2025, on the Council's position for Chat Control 2.0, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands voted against. Italy abstained. The other 22 states voted in favour.