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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

It's not clickbait. Many member states do support this. Much of the disagreement is on just how rights-violating the scanning should be.

The situation here in Denmark is dire: nobody in the Danish media reports on it, so everybody just shrugs. I've gone out of my way to educate my coworkers and most are unaware many members of our parliament want this. The number of parties that support it outnumber those who don't. Writing to our representatives is met with silence.

Everyone looking to Denmark as a model state should beware what happens when you have a population with such high trust in its government: the roots of autocracy are allowed to grow unfettered.

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Denmark is very liberal in some ways but very much not in others. MitID -- digital id-- is a gateway to everything and is very much gated in terms of access; it took me months to sort out. It's a crime to not tell the state where you live, or to have too many people living in your house (I'd love to know what happens if you give birth on a "full" house -- is there a grace period, or do you have to move?). The work laptop I have been issued with is filled with invasive spyware that no British university employee would tolerate, and it is run (very well) as a benign dictatorship. You can't get a phone SIM card without personal registration. The tax agency know exactly to the øre how much money you received and what you spent it on in a given year as basically every transaction is recorded.

I'm not complaining that much about it -- you have a fantastic social security system, low inequality, high pay and high taxes, leading to a happy and well educated population and great food (no upf!) -- but it is a vision of the 1960s nanny state that really does think it knowd best.

>>Denmark is very liberal in some ways

True like not banning bestiality until 2015....

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-32411241

We also accidentally legalized child pornography for a short period after 1969. That was unintentional though.

Wait, wait, hol' up, double take. How does one accidentally legalize child pornography?

You forget to exclude it from the law that legalize pornography. Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography, so obviously there where a bunch of, should we say "edge cases" that the lawmakers forgot to think about.

The Danish national television made a documentary, there's also a short article: https://www.dr.dk/om-dr/programmer-og-koncerter/candy-film-d... you can probably just run it through Google translate. The worst part is that it took like 10 - 11 years to fix.

Not sure about the laptop with spyware, that's mostly illegal, though some security software could easily be used to spy on users if the company ignores the rules.

A lot of the stuff the government registeres about an individual is required to ensure that things runs as smoothly and efficiently as they do, even if Danes will frequently complain that the government is anything but smooth and efficient. There was always an understanding and laws protecting that data from being misused. Those rules have slowly been eroding over the past 20 years or so, by increasingly zealots politicians seeking to be "tough on crime and misuse of government services (i.e. brown people not working and living on social welfare)".

Illegal access to information about citizens are pretty frequent, yet our politicians don't seem to ever wanting to back down from collection and analysing data. They are either not smart enough to see the dangers or they are deliberately attempting to create a surveillance state.

So that's exactly how it is in Switzerland and people still say it's the best place in the world. Maybe sometimes the trust in the authorities is also warranted, right? Just keep them in check all the time, it's the only way to keep that trust - or you have this happening.

I mean Singapore is a pretty nice place to stay in too, but it's still not super free and pretty authoritarian. There are tons of factors that make a place "nice" to be in. In my experience though, at least Danemark is a bit of an odd place. It looks nice for Danes but it's a very monocultural place. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that was a bit apparent to me from an outsider's pov.

The way article is formulated little bit as clickbait.

Title tries to scare while content says it's just a topic being reintroduced. If anybody knows EU laws and is aware that to introduce such change all states need to agree... then I just wish DK good luck until it's anyhow confirmed at _all_ not many states do support this.

I come from different EU state and I first time hear this is big topic, seems then it's not such a big topic outside Denmark maybe?

> Everyone looking to Denmark as a model state should beware what happens when you have a population with such high trust in its government: the roots of autocracy are allowed to grow unfettered.

Denmark is currently one of the nicest places you can find in the world. If that’s what happens when you trust the government then sign me up!

PS. I know the situation can quickly deteriorate if you’re not constantly monitoring what the government does and agree with OP on that. Just thought it was incredibly naive to try to make the point that this can lead to an autocracy while showing one of the most well functioning democracies in the world. The USA seems like a much better example, and even then compared to most countries in the world, as you can see by the amount of people trying to move there, it’s still a pretty damn nice place to go.

>If that’s what happens when you trust the government then sign me up!

Like that?

https://cphpost.dk/2024-05-05/news/climate/danish-companies-...

>>Danish companies breach EU law, dump toxic waste into sea – Environment Ministry waves it through

Or that?

https://eos.org/thelandslideblog/nordic-waste-1

>>The Nordic Waste landslide scandal in Denmark

Maybe how about that? (50 years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K--KsfrEhPI

>>How Denmark forced young women in Greenland to get IUDs

>How Denmark forced young women in Greenland to get IUDs

And who still take away the babies of Greenlandic mothers in Denmark.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/29/controv...

Parenting test.....this is disgusting, thanks for the update.

Yes, if you are an ethnic Dane in the majority, that's probably true. But that's almost always true. Governments, even autocratic ones, usually don't go against the majority. But for everyone else, yes it's absolutely worrying. Just a small example, Danemark is the only country that has force deported almost every Syrian refugee, children included back, in 2021. I'd get it now that the war is over, but it wasn't then. Even Trump didn't do that.

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