EU to Vote Again on ‘Chat Control’ Message Scanning Extension
The European Parliament is set to vote again on whether to extend the EU’s controversial “chat control” rules on Thursday. These measures would let tech firms scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, a requirement that critics say undermines privacy and conflicts with end-to-end encrypted messaging.
On Tuesday, lawmakers advanced the proposal through a rarely used urgent procedure. Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová said the process violated Parliament’s own procedures and called it a bid to extend the derogation that expired in early April. She also warned that rejecting or amending the proposal requires an absolute majority of 361 votes.
Voting Tuesday narrowly passed: 331 in favor, 304 against, and 11 abstaining. The scheme was previously rejected in March, when Parliament voted 311 against, 228 for, and 92 abstaining after amendments sought to restrict the scope of scans.
Euronews reported the latest push was revived by the European People’s Party (EPP), which largely opposed the measure in March. EU member states also agreed last month to reinstate an interim “chat control” approach allowing service providers to detect, report, and remove abusive material until 2028.
For crypto traders, this “chat control” news matters because it signals tightening EU oversight of private communications, potentially reinforcing regulatory risk sentiment around privacy tech, messaging platforms, and end-to-end encryption use cases.
Neutral
This is a communications-privacy regulation vote, not a direct crypto rule change, so immediate fundamentals for major coins are limited. However, renewed “chat control” in the EU can still affect market sentiment: traders have historically priced privacy-restrictive policies as a threat to end-to-end encryption use cases, sometimes increasing risk-off behavior in privacy-sensitive narratives. Because the article highlights procedural uncertainty (a new vote after a prior rejection) and only interim measures are mentioned up to 2028, the likely near-term reaction is more sentiment-driven than trend-breaking.
In the short term, expect volatility around EU regulatory headlines and any linkage to privacy tech; in the long term, the outcome could influence compliance and user behavior across messaging services, which may indirectly affect adoption and sentiment for privacy-related ecosystems.