alt Hacker NewsWhat scanning means, and how that might affect people and society, are precisely the issues in dispute. A poll which tries to provide arguments and evidence about contested issues cannot yield meaningful results. To pursue this line of reasoning, for example:
> Your context-free formulation on the other hand provides no information for voters to weigh. Privacy or child porn detection? Well I guess I’ll pick child porn detection. Oh, you wanted to do what to my privacy? Never mind!
you might ask questions like "How comfortable would you be with your personal mobile provider scanning your chats for child porn?" or "What would you consider to be an acceptable accuracy rate for such a scanner?". Then you could reasonably infer that respondents who say "not comfortable" or "90-100%" oppose Chat Control, because Chat Control will perform such scans and they're not 90% accurate. (Someone else who thinks the scans are 90% accurate might respond that your interpretation is wrong, but this dispute would not call the poll results themselves into question.)
Yes, and it would have been great if the EU had asked these sorts of questions publicly to develop its policy. Instead it was developed mostly behind closed doors, and it was up to politicians like Breyer to oppose this in Parliament. He presented the question as a political opponent would, although he gave an “out” for people who disagree—you can still answer his question by supporting Chat Control if you feel most strongly about catching criminals.
I don’t think the voting result would be different if he had been even more fair about this question, as the poll is not something that MEPs are going to care about. This was clearly designed to be passed by any means necessary, and this time they got it through. But at least now people have a poll to use when they campaign to repeal it in the future, or when they want to point to the unrepresentative nature of EU decisions like this one.