EU Parliament allows Meta, Google to scan user messages until 2028

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Publication Date: 2026-07-13 13:27:27

First published in Deník N.

Overview

MEPs have voted on whether Big Tech companies such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft should have the right to scan users' unencrypted messages and emails for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Although a majority of lawmakers opposed the measure, a legislative trick used by the European Parliament allowed the message-scanning proposal to pass.

As a result, tech companies can continue to read messages written using their applications until April 2028, even though such practices conflict with European privacy laws. Companies including Meta and Google have received an exemption from these laws, justified by the need to protect children from abuse and combat child sexual abuse material.

Here is why this matters.

How Did We Get to the Current Chat Control Debate?

Tech companies such as Meta and Google have been scanning private communications for illegal content since the launch of their relevant services. More precisely, these checks have not been limited to illegal content; they have also covered material that violated the rules of the respective services, as defined by their operators. In some countries, these rules could be even stricter than legal requirements.

The practice of operators scanning private conversations was repeatedly criticised by online privacy advocates. At the same time, many accepted that a private operator had the right to set whatever rules it deemed appropriate for its own product. The essential point is that at this stage, there was no legal regulation involved.

The operators’ approach ran up against increasingly strict European privacy protection, based on the ePrivacy directive. It has been expanded and amended several times and, since 2016, has included the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Reading private conversations by digital companies thus effectively became illegal in the EU.

However, EU institutions continued to tolerate it for certain specific purposes.

The issue of child pornography—politically and emotionally sensitive—has always been among the foremost reasons for occasionally ignoring privacy protection, together with the fight against terrorism and organised crime.

This situation was given a legal framework in 2021, when EU bodies adopted a temporary exemption from privacy protection (in the form of Regulation 2021/1232) "for the purposes of the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of criminal offences linked to child sexual abuse."

With this exemption, the nickname "chat control"—control of private communication, originally meant as a slur—entered European political debate.

It has, and still has, a development of its own. To distinguish between its individual stages, the 2021 regulation is called Chat Control 1.0.

The exemption was worded relatively cautiously. It did not order electronic communication operators to do anything. It only gave them the right to voluntarily monitor the content of messages and emails until at least April 2028. The method and scope of this monitoring were left to the discretion of the respective companies.

Tech companies such as Meta, Google, and others thus simply continued their previous practice, now with a legal guarantee from the EU and in growing cooperation with Union bodies and individual member states.

The exemption from 2021—and this is crucial—was approved as a temporary measure. Its validity expired on 26 March 2026, but European institutions are now dealing with this issue intensively to have a permanent solution.

What Is the Difference Between Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0?

Chat Control 1.0 divided European politicians in terms of their views. Few were satisfied with it. One group regarded it as an unacceptable breach of privacy and demanded its repeal, while another assessed the measure as insufficient.

The formulation "one group and the other group" is unavoidable here because there is no clear political dividing line between them. It is not a conflict between left and right, between conservatives and liberals, nor along any of the usual fracture lines.

Politicians favouring a higher degree of control began to prepare more far-reaching measures—Chat Control 2.0—as early as 2020, before the temporary exemption was adopted. The specific shape of the plan for stronger...