This is, btw. decidedly not a “EU bad”-topic as this is an ongoing struggle between the council (of member-state governments) and the parliament (elected by the people). It’s a fight that happens in every single nation that has a division of powers. The executive wants something and tries to get it through the legislative or somehow around it, while the legislative introduces an alternative solution and tries to assert its power over the legislative process.

In this case the EU Parliament has proposed an alternative solution that is more targeted, more privacy-friendly and (most importantly) actually legal.

Parliament’s alternative: prevention, web-cleaning and targeted warrants
The European Parliament’s cross-party negotiating mandate takes a different approach designed to protect children more effectively and within legal limits:

• Security by Design: safety-focused default settings and features to reduce grooming and exploitation risks (e.g. limiting unsolicited contact and content sharing by default, child-appropriate privacy defaults, and on-device, user-controlled warnings and guidance before displaying/sharing sensitive content).
• Proactive “web cleaning”: empowering the EU Centre to proactively search publicly accessible content for known CSAM.
• Targeted enforcement: searching private communications only under judicial authorisation and only targeted to specific persons or groups where there are reasonable grounds linking them to child sexual abuse offences — producing higher-quality leads and avoiding overload from mass false positives.