No sooner than the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation rules went into effect Friday, tech companies are now gearing up for another battle with what has been called even stricter regulation.

That would be the “Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications,” or the “ePrivacy Regulation.” The law, approved by the European Parliament, is currently being reviewed by the Council of the European Union.

In short, the ePrivacy Regulation will grant users of electronic communications the same privacy people have with other telecommunications services. It will mean that tech companies that offer private communications, such as chats on apps such as Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail and even video games cannot listen into, intercept or record any messaging, nor use the data from such messaging, without explicitly asking to do so.

The proposal states that all communications under this new law “are confidential regardless of the technology used, the proposed rules will also apply to internet-based voice and internet-messaging services.”

“Do you really want that app to use your metadata? Do you really want them to read your content on a dating app?” Birgit Sippel, a European Parliament member who drafted the ePrivacy legislation, told the New York Times. “Consumers need to get back control over what is happening with their lives and their data.”

The Times mentioned several trade groups that have said the rules will cost tech companies billions of dollars, stating that data-driven services will suffer greatly and innovation will be stifled.

Big names in tech, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and IBM Corp., as well as the American Chamber of Commerce and other groups, are lobbying against the legislation. As the video above demonstrates, the gist of the resistance is that the rules will ruin some companies, leading to a doomsday scenario. “From tech Mecca, to tech wasteland, enter the app-ocalypse,” the video states in rather florid language.

Others, however, have called this fear-mongering:

Industry mounts a ridiculous scare campaign that limiting ad targeting will bring the global economy to its knees. Problem for them is that advertising thrived without surveillance for over a century. https://t.co/TmaSGYRbHK

— David Carroll (@profcarroll) May 28, 2018

Image: Goldback Group/YouTube