Developers Alliance welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on the proposal for a regulation on preventing and combating child sexual abuse material (CSAM). EU lawmakers need to wisely balance the tradeoffs before implementing a de facto online surveillance system in the EU. The chosen policy option ignored the following facts:
- Companies will always err on the side of caution when faced with absolute obligations and strict sanctions.
- Technology, like human decision making, is imperfect; there will always be false positives which put at risk fundamental rights. Once broken, end-to-end encryption is compromised forever, with significant impact far beyond CSAM.
- Technology is not enough to protect children. Social problems are solved by tackling their roots.
