[EnKopVand]

I worked in digitalisation in the Danish public sector for a decade. It was at municipality level, but I did some work on the national strategies, and I'm sometimes just dumbfounded with how HN reacts to these sort of things. Of course SoMe networks have these sorts of portals... How did you expect they were allowed to operate in the sense they are? Obviously it's very 1984, but even in the West it's not like the secret police agencies aren't using every bit of privacy data they can get their hands on, they just do it differently than they would in an autocracy because we still have some rule of law protecting western citizens.

Here in Denmark we've had a silly amount of "scandals" going back to echelon, where our government works with the US government to share danish citizen data in a way where our PET and FE (police and defence secret services) also benefit from it. In fact we're currently in the middle of a scandal where the former head of FE is possibly being charged with espionage because he may have told his mother about the US getting raw access to all Danish internet data at some family dinner. I say possibly and may because it's so locked down that we basically only know about it because he was arrested and things got leaked. But we do know that our secret police called every editor of every major news paper in for a little "talk" where they tried to scare our editors into not printing the story.

Like I mentioned, it goes way back, back to before echelon really, and the Internet is fundamentally autocratic because we all need an ISP to get on it. I don't think there is really a big difference between the ISP and other "monopoly" companies in the sense that they all work with the governments in the areas in which they operate.

It's obviously a dance of diplomacy, law and business. As you can see with the GDPR and how the EU is dealing with US tech companies, or how Facebook complies with autocracies around the world. It's no different in western countries, I mean, why do you think Condoleezza Rice got on the board of directors of Dropbox?

In a post Snowden world it's not even tinfoil anymore, but most of us just don't really care.