This appears to be the document under discussion: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Not sure why this isn't said clearly in the article. Unfortunately, not referencing original sources is common practice among European digital rights groups.
People are not going to speak their mind and they wont believe anything they see or hear on the internet. They will want to monitor that fake digital dystopia of course and you will need to come up with your own personal security strategy against surveillance like Ursula did by deleting some text messages as an example.
Also known as EU Going Dark, just a rebrand since ChatControl and GoingDark got traction. They expect people to forget it quite easily.
Have you written to your MEPs expressing your concerns yet?
I did once write to about 20 of them about another topic.
First of all, this is surprisingly hard, even for someone whose expectations were already pretty low; Similarly hard as it is to contact anyone from an actual company: you have to go through circular FAQs and robots and I ultimately had to write a small scrapper to get the postal and/or email address of the people of interest.
One month later I received one answer, from one of the ~20 people I mailed (which did not told me anything I didn't already knew, but reasserted that my concern won't move the needle - fair enough).
No, the European Commission is not democratically elected and I have no reason to think they’ll pay any attention to the concerns of the public.
I fully agree and that's why I said MEPs and not commissioners. I have never received any response from a commissioner. I have received a response from a MEP. What else can we do? Public awareness (please post this on your social media and sites) and writing to representatives is all we can do.
The European Commission is elected by the parliament, as are most democratic governments on this earth. There is very few (if any?) governments out there that are directly elected. At most the head of the government is elected directly.
Commissioners are appointed by member states but need not have been subject to a public vote. The president of the commission is voted upon by the European parliament.
> The president of the commission is voted upon by the European parliament
I know that this is the wording the EU itself chooses to put there, but no. They are not "voted upon". Parliament cannot choose a EU commission president. The council (the heads of state of the member states) put forth a candidate and if the parliament says no, the council has to select a president (this time ... without the parliament needing to confirm them)
Like anything else in the EU, the executive is in full control of
1) itself
2) law in the EU (the commission is the ONLY EU institution that can make laws, and yes, the essential part of that is that the parliament IS NOT in charge of EU law. It can neither force a law through nor can the EU parliament prevent the commission from enacting a law)
Yep, sure. MEPs are in european parliament, anyway.
The commission is elected indirectly, as I'm sure you're aware.