Because the EU values their citizens privacy tech may leave. Personally I could live with that if that is the result of my privacy being protected.
And then there is a 'chat control' every year pushed relentlessly. Thus no, not at all. EU doesn't value citizens privacy.
Chat control keeps being proposed by the same Swedish politician, and she will continue to do so and she will continue to fail- because politicians in the EU are already aware its stupid.
Chat control is not just the love child from the Swedish politician, it is being pushed by US surveillance companies that convinced the commission members that CP can be detected and stopped only if Europol has access to all your messages, emails, photos and videos until the end of time without having any recourse as to what it will be used for or by whom it will be viewed.
Then there is also Chat Control V1 which is currently extended each year despite being a temporary measure supposedly. Then there is also the data retention directive which everyone knows was illegal to start with and took 10 years to be overturned.
The fact that people still associate EU with privacy is a joke. The EU wants your data just like Meta and Apple or Google. At least Meta is not trying to gaslight me into thinking that giving my data is to save the children or some other complete BS reason.
The EU laws typically fall on the side of promoting privacy and protecting citizens against large multinational organisations (criminal and legitimate).
There is a need for greater powers to prevent crime, but nobody is going to weaken privacy for it. The most likely outcome is a centralised interpol-esque database to track and track suspects more quickly. Right now its very easy for criminals to just change hosting region and the investigating national police have no jurisdiction to do anything. It’s a large issue.
Chat Control breaks encryption because it wants to snoop on the messages/photos before being encrypted EtoE by the messaging providers.
There is no need for greater powers to prevent crime. It has been determined that there isn't enough funding to investigate the crimes reported already and now this system is supposed to report even more crime at the price of my privacy.
I could see potentially a system where known suspects are targeted specifically but in this case, everybody is a suspect. What happened to presumption of innocence?
The fact of the matter is that chat control is the digital Stasi, always listening to your conversations, analyzing your messages. God forbid the algorithm flags your innocent picture wrongly.
Is this the future we want?
Lets not forget that half of the EU actually lived under a quasi socialist regime not that long ago...