EU Parliament Reauthorizes Mass Message Scanning Law Despite Majority Voting Against It

The European Parliament on July 9, 2026, reauthorized the ePrivacy derogation, a law permitting tech companies to voluntarily scan private messages and emails for known child sexual abuse material without a warrant. Although 314 MEPs voted against the measure and only 276 voted in favor, the law passed because blocking it required an absolute majority of 361 votes out of 720 total members, meaning every absent lawmaker effectively counted as a vote to keep it. The European People's Party used an urgency procedure to schedule the vote on the final day before summer recess, when many MEPs had already left Strasbourg. Platforms such as Instagram, Gmail, Discord, and Snapchat are affected, while WhatsApp and Signal are exempt due to their end-to-end encryption. The EU Commission's own evaluation found that only a tiny fraction of scanned messages contained illegal content, and up to 20% of flagged content represented false positives, raising serious questions about the law's effectiveness.