Bad news, The European Parliament has approved the extension of the EU’s temporary ChatControl 1.0 rules until April 2028, but the way it passed sparked backlash.
In today’s vote, MEPs voted on a proposal to reject the Council’s position on the extension:
> 314 MEPs voted to reject it.
> 276 MEPs voted against rejecting it, meaning they supported the extension.
>17 MEPs abstained.
Even though more MEPs voted to reject the extension than to support it, the motion still failed.
This happened because the vote followed the EU’s second-reading procedure, which requires an absolute majority of all Members of the European Parliament(at least 361 votes) to reject the Council’s position.
A simple majority of the votes cast was not enough.
As a result, the Council’s position was automatically approved, and the ChatControl 1.0 extension was adopted.
The extension keeps the temporary rules that let online platforms voluntarily detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) while the EU continues working on the permanent ChatControl 2.0 proposal.
🚨🇪🇺 The European Commission is about to steal your search history in one of the largest forced data grabs in the history of the open internet, and almost nobody is talking about it.
The scope is staggering:
🔴 Every query you type
🔴 Every voice and photo search
🔴 Every autocomplete you accept
🔴 Your language, your device
🔴 Your country pinned to a ~3km² grid
🔴 Every result you saw, every link you hovered
🔴 Every click and scroll
🔴 The full chronological order of your search sessions
Meaning the European Union now knows your:
🔴 Health symptoms
🔴 Pregnancy
🔴 Sexual orientation
🔴 Political views
🔴 Religious beliefs
🔴 Financial distress
🔴 Legal trouble
🔴 Addictions
🔴 Affairs
Under the proposed measures for DMA Article 6(11), Google would be ordered to ship the daily search behaviour of hundreds of millions of Europeans to multiple third parties through a daily API feed. Any approved "online search engine," AI chatbots included, would get five years of access.
The things people only ever type when they think no one is watching. All of it now scheduled to flow daily into an open-ended list of third parties scattered across the European Union.
Brussels promises "anonymisation." The reality is a thin technical veneer that has been broken in academic literature again and again for over a decade. Search behaviour is a fingerprint. Stripping a name does not change that.
Mass data leaks become inevitable. Every new beneficiary is a new attack surface, and every annual audit is a year of silent exposure between checks. The 2025 Discord vendor breach already showed how fast 70,000 government IDs can leak through a single weak link. Now imagine that link holding Europe's search history.
Surveillance without consent becomes the default. Hundreds of millions of EU citizens never agreed to have their queries packaged and shipped to companies they have never heard of. The legal fiction of "anonymisation" cannot manufacture consent that was never given.
Behavioural search data is a goldmine for phishing, blackmail, social engineering, and corporate espionage.
Foreign intelligence services get a back door without effort. They do not need to breach Google. They only need to compromise the weakest name on the beneficiary list. One insolvent startup. One compromised contractor. One approved entity quietly acquired by a hostile state.
In the name of "competition," the EU is about to manufacture a permanent, distributed, daily-refreshed copy of Europe's collective search history. A surveillance dataset Brussels itself would never approve if any other government tried to build it.
The public consultation closes Friday, May 1, 2026 at 23:59 CEST. The final binding decision lands July 27, 2026.
After that, the door does not close again.
Tag your MEPs! File a response! Make noise!
Obsidian is now free for work.
Starting today, the Obsidian Commercial license is optional. Anyone can use Obsidian for work, for free. If Obsidian benefits your organization, you can still purchase Commercial licenses to support development.
Nothing else is changing. No account required, no ads, no tracking, no strings attached. Your data remains fully in your control, stored locally in plain text Markdown files. All features are available to you for free without limits.
Why make this change? Simplicity. The Commercial license terms were confusing and added unnecessary complexity to our pricing. Furthermore, as the Obsidian Manifesto states: "we believe that everyone should have the tools to think clearly and organize ideas effectively". This change brings us closer to that principle.
People in over 10,000 organizations use Obsidian. Many work in high-security environments, like government, cybersecurity, and finance. Some of the largest organizations in the world, including Amazon and Google, have thousands of employees using Obsidian every day. These teams rely on Obsidian to think more effectively and keep total ownership over private data.
Previously, people at companies with two or more employees were required to purchase a Commercial license to use Obsidian for work. Going forward, the Commercial license is no longer required, but remains an optional way for organizations to support Obsidian, similar to the Catalyst license for individuals.
Organizations that support Obsidian are now featured on the Obsidian Enterprise page. Your organization can be showcased by purchasing 25 licenses or more.
Along with Commercial and Catalyst support, our add-on services, Sync and Publish help Obsidian remain 100% user-supported. In the future, we hope to offer more services designed for teams. As always, these will be optional.