A variant of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.

Not if you trust your data to a company that makes money from selling said data to advertising companies.

What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?

Ugh, there’s a Google search I’m happy not to do.

The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.

However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.

GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.

GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.

Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.

The plumbers will. The electricians will. The carpenters will. The bricklayers will. The farmers will. The steel plant workers will. The dockyard workers will.

Yes, if you’ve got savings invested it’ll touch you, but the actual jobs - you know the ones adding and making real, concrete things, probably won’t notice a big different if the AI stocks tank 30% in a day.

Evidence or speculation?

It wouldn’t stand up to traffic pattern analysis:

• VPN traffic tend to have very uniform traffic pattern
• Most VPN traffic runs on UDP, not TCP
• All VPN protocols that I’m aware of have characteristic handshake patterns, even wireguards extremely fast 1-RTT handshake.
• HTTPS traffic is very bursts and TCP retransmission patterns look very distinct.

But then I doubt an ISP would run deep traffic pattern analysis on all traffic. So you’d probably be fine.

But yeah, setting up your own VPN server on some random 1-core/2 GB RAM server is extremely easy.

That’s wrong.

Article 4(3) TEU requires that the country holding the rotating presidency of the council must act in the spirit of sincere cooperation, which means it must act as an “honest broker” and not pursue national interests. This means it must seek to find a compromise if the council cannot agree, which Denmark has done.

Look, I’m not a fan of chat control. But the blame doesn’t lie with the Danes, it’s the whole of the EU one must blame.

And for anyone actually bothering to read the legislation instead of joining the band wagon, that’s is literally exactly what the EU proposal calls for: Zero Knowledge Proof.

https://youtu.be/ULFTrTznG7Y

Scan your biometric proof (passport, id card or log into government issued service), get a set of ZKP tokens which the app can release on demand. These tokens are not traceable back to your identity.

Because Denmark holds the rotating EU presidency, Denmark is literally required by treaty to work towards compromise when the council cannot agree. If it wasn’t Denmark doing this work, it would be another country holding the EU presidency doing it.

It’s not really about Denmark - it’s about the entire council agreeing with a compromise the presidency has to seek.