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Comment by paxcoder | Hacker News Reader

While the situation with tracking in the West is awful, there's a huge difference between having a choice, however impractical, and being spied on in secret.

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In Sweden, it's illegal to buy prepaid mobile phones with cash since august 1, 2022.

In contrast, in Serbia you can buy simcards without ID at any kiosk

There is no choice. It is literally illegal for me to buy a decent laptop with cash in Portugal for example.

Why is that? Can you provide a source? (Not distrusting you, but it would be great to have a source because I'm a writer and interested in writing about these things.)

Maybe because of this https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas...

It's the law. You can't pay in cash for anything above three thousand euros. If you're a company the limit is even lower at 1000 Euros. Interesting though that a foreigner, such as a tourist, can pay up to 10 thousand euros in cash as long it's not a business transaction.

This is a lie.

Not much else to say about it, it just is not true.

I know people living in Portugal, first hand, with pretty beefy and expensive laptops.

He means buying it in cash. Anti money laundering / tax evasion laws in some places prohibit using cash above a certain limit

It is still a lie.

I think the limit in Portugal for cash transactions is around €3k. You can buy a pretty great laptop with that

My entire point was that we don't really have a choice -- for example, most people do not have a choice to own a phone any more. It's a practically mandatory sort of technology. So, we don't really have a choice here either, only the illusion of one.

It's also not just your phone. People seem to have forgotten about things like PRISM [1] because it's no longer in the news, but it's still very much around and likely only more extensive. The surveillance state extends far beyond just phones.

Yet these articles, from well known organisations, extensively investigating (even featuring 0 day revelations) the decline of civil society in lieu of ever more pervasive surveillance and manipulation of opinion, only seem to ever focus on geopolitical adversaries of the US.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Yep, I agree with that. It's much worse than just phones.

Unless you're living in a cabin in rural Alaska or something, you are being spied on in secret (do we still use that word, post-Snowden?) in the West.

"No smart phone" merely removes some of the fine detail from the GB's of data that the 3-letters have about you.

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