Digital House Arrest – How the EU Wants to Disempower Families
Of all people, it is center-right parties in Brussels that are supporting plans for the mass screening of private messages. The proposal cuts deep into civil liberties. The consequences for chats between teenagers and their own parents are particularly drastic.
The battle over “chat control” and the confidentiality of our communications has long since become the defining question regarding the relationship between the state and the citizen in the digital age. On December 4th, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Magnus Brunner (EPP) defended plans before the European Parliament that cut deeply into civil liberties. What is particularly bitter for conservative voters is that it is precisely the center-right-led governments in Berlin and Vienna that have helped secure a majority for this assault on privacy in Brussels. While the leader of the German CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Jens Spahn, assured the public in October that suspicionless scanning of chats was akin to “preemptively opening every letter to see if it contains something illegal”—and that neither he nor his party would support it—reality now looks quite different.
The EU governments have agreed on a rotten compromise. While “voluntary” chat control is technically supposed to be at the discretion of the providers, the result is the same: American tech giants like Meta or Google will be allowed to screen our private messages en masse and without any initial suspicion. The state is effectively outsourcing its monopoly on law enforcement and deputizing US corporations as sheriffs. Instead of independent judges, error-prone secret algorithms from Silicon Valley will decide whether our chats are suspicious.
Mr. Spahn still owes us an answer to a crucial question: How is this mass screening any different from suspicionless chat control? Would the indiscriminate opening of our letters be acceptable just because Deutsche Post decided to do it voluntarily? The privacy of correspondence is “inviolable” under our Basic Law (Grundgesetz). Privatized chat control remains a violation of fundamental principles in a constitutional state.
ID Cards for the Internet
Yet, hidden within the draft law on chat control is a perhaps even more perfidious attack on freedom—a clause with the potential to destroy the internet as we know it: The opening of an email or messenger account is to require mandatory age verification. What sounds like a technicality is actually political dynamite. It spells the end of the right to anonymous digital communication. Anyone wishing to use WhatsApp, Signal, or even a simple email inbox in the future will have to show their ID card or their face.
A whistleblower wishing to remain anonymous for fear of investigation will hardly dare to tip off a journalist about government corruption if they have to upload their ID to a database to do so. They are effectively being silenced. Investigative journalism, anonymous pastoral care, and confidential counseling in crisis situations will become impossible. Furthermore, it is only a matter of time before these internet ID databases are hacked, opening the floodgates for criminals to commit identity theft. Our security is not being protected here; it is being endangered. Moreover, a new bureaucratic monster is being created. While the economy groans under the weight of regulations, European tech start-ups and companies are being forced to implement complex new verification systems.
The State as Super-Nanny
The height of hubris, however, is the planned treatment of adolescents. According to the will of the EU governments, app stores should blanketly refuse the installation of apps to anyone under 17 if those apps could theoretically be misused for “cyber grooming.” The aim is to protect minors from being approached with sexual intent. However, since the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia notes that this occurs on almost all platforms—from WhatsApp and Instagram to online games—this regulation amounts to a digital ban on communication.
You have to let that sink in: A 16-year-old would no longer be allowed to chat with their class teacher, their coach, or—even more absurdly—with their own parents. The state presumes to know what is good for our children better than families do. The parental right to raise children, protected by the constitution, is being trampled underfoot. How well parents know their own children’s maturity no longer counts.
This is not child protection; it is digital house arrest. Instead of hunting the perpetrators, the victims are being locked up. This is the logic of an overreaching nanny state that mistrusts its citizens. True security comes from strong families, not from state paternalism that drives teenagers into digital isolation. It won’t work anyway: our children will simply ask us to register their phones as adult devices.
Ineffective Symbolic Politics
Overall, these measures miss their mark completely. The Association of German Criminal Investigators is already warning of an overload due to the flood of automated chat reports. Almost half of the reported chats are perfectly legal—such as holiday photos from the beach. There will be no time left for genuine cases because investigators will be busy screening harmless citizens.
The European Parliament has recognized this madness. Across party lines, it is demanding that chat surveillance be limited to actual suspects and is rejecting mandatory age checks and app bans. It is banking on civil principles: proportionality and targeted prosecution instead of mass surveillance and the paternalism of millions of innocent people.
However, without support from Berlin, this sensible position will not prevail in the upcoming negotiations on the final wording of the law. The center-right-led federal government must decide: Does it want the “transparent citizen” and the disempowerment of parents? Or will it return to the values of the Constitution? When the state begins to have our mail opened and forbids our children contact with the outside world, a red line has been crossed. We do not need a nanny from Brussels—and certainly not one from Berlin.
This guest commentary first appeared in Die Welt.
