The distinction is very much blurred, and there is much more profitable way to use data than getting people to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.
The speed sign detection can be a bit funny at times. Mine often read signs that are for roads next to the one I'm driving, which occasionally include train tracks. Seeing a maximum speed that is 200 km/h is a bit funny, through less so when the camera catches a small road parallel with the highway with speeds that's 1/4th that of the highway. If the cruise control would follow those, the first one would be very illegal and the second one quite dangerous and possibly illegal if it got stuck like that. It also has detected a 357 km/h (or around that) while driving in the city, possibly by random patterns from a shop's street window.
The lane assist can also become confused by shadows created by a fence next to the road when the sun is just slightly above the horizon. The car thought I was driving between two roads and tried to steer me to the side, but it was a single lane highway. That was the last time I had it enabled.
This seems fairly common in most countries, and I would guess the reason is for practical reasons. When police are out they have a fairly high probability to stumble onto more than just the specifics things they was sent out to do, and so they need to have access to check up people and vehicles.
What my country do (and others?) is to keep a strict records of every lookup, with different levels of auditor, some which checks every record in a shallow way and some which do random sampling with more deep checks. The punishment for misuse of the database is also fairly harsh.
The deceptive aspect is the stronger part of the objection. Banning any and all political messages in Debian packages would go too far and I doubt the community would support it. People and in extension developers, can be quite political active and will put some of that into their works. I am sure (as in I don't need to verify) that the pride flag is somewhere in Debian right now, in some package, and banning it would cause much more conflict than allowing it to remain where it is. The problem really only exist if people would have it shoved into their faces through deception.
An other example of political message is when projects redirect donations to a cause. Should projects be banned from having a "donate to Ukraine" somewhere in a program, maybe with a Ukraine flag next to it?
The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.
You lack basic knowledge of how Sweden work and seem to construct a straw man arguments based on that lack of knowledge.
In Sweden everyone must by law go through basic education as children, and all education is free, including higher education. The government get no profits from schools as there is no fees for the government to collect. It is all paid through taxes. Your are using that "dumb-think" of yours, assuming that immigration from countries that does not provide basic education for all their citizens will have the same level of education as people from countries that do.
> Which can also be explained with regular budget pressure from neoliberal fiscal hawks. I dont know the swedish specifics.
You clearly do not understand how Sweden operate or how local government functions, are clearly too lazy to look it up. The budget for municipalities primarily comes from local taxes, paid by citizens that live in that region. There are a national budget posts that get distributed between municipalities, but they only cover some parts of the local budget. Regions with a lot of high income and high tax paying citizens will have more money to spend than regions with a lot of citizens that are unemployed and on welfare.
1/3 of refugees never becomes economical self-sufficient. That is basic statistical fact. If you don't like the statistics you can pretend that math is racism or something dishonest like that. The plain fact is that taking in refugees has costed Sweden money, and the more refugees that comes in the higher the cost is. The math doesn't say if the cost isn't morally worth it, or if refugees children or children children will some day repay the cost, or if then it is worth to pay a cost now for a possible profit in the future that we don't know. All the math say is that there is a cost per person and year from taking in refugees that will not be repaid by those refugees.
Calling it a political startup is not that unfair.
I would add that in practice it is even less significant that one may think. Parties for local government has an incentive to make loud declaration of national policy in order to present themselves as more legitimate compared to national political parties. However, local government do not have any actually power to implement such policies. Local government decide things like "should we build a new public bath house", or "should we create a local investigation if the that one large road through the city should a speed limit or 30 instead of 40". In terms of practical immigration policy, what a local government control is things like encouraging access to housing, specific integration initiatives that is local to that region, and other details for when immigrants arrive to that specific municipality. In this case we are talking about a municipality the size of 160 000 people.
Thus this funding may increase the probability that they will get more than the 5 seats out of 65 that exist in Örebro County Council, which they got from a total of 7000 votes in the latest election. If they manage to get 12% of the 160 000 votes, they will also get one bonus seat in the parliament which is a special rule in the Swedish election system. That single seat out of 350 could in theory do some harm if the election results happens to also be very close between the two blocks of left and right wing parties.
There are special ethical investment funds with policies like no military manufacturers, no fossil fuel producers, and so on. They will generally pay less, have higher management costs, but they do exists. You do have a choose in which funds and stock options you buy, including which pension funds you invest in.
A bank account is not a legal requirement in Sweden, which I know for a fact since I know a person in Sweden who do not have one. The agreements between the government and some banks is that banks must accept customers who ask for a bank account. They can't however force a person to go into a contract with a private bank against their will.
I will give you that it is a more significant choice to choose which companies one want to invest ones savings on, in contrast to spending a few bucks on a vpn. I would however argue that the moral impact from the amount of money invested in funds and pension plans are more important then the choice of a VPN, thus hold a bigger ethical question.
There was a study done in Sweden on the economics of immigration during the large immigration crisis of 2015, and the result was a significant net-negative of 7 800 € per person per year. Taking in a large number of refugees with significant lower education and overall wealth compared to existing populations, with a welfare and healthcare system that Sweden has, cost significant more than what it produce in increased taxes.
There is the concept of social dumping where municipalities try to get immigrants on welfare to move to other municipalities in order to reduce costs and balance the budget, and those other municipalities are now complaining loudly that their budgets have major deficits because of this strategy. Schools also complain about this issue since a large influx of low-income citizens put an increase budget costs without any increase in tax revenue, meaning higher costs and fewer teachers per student.
A more recent study in 2025, ordered by the government, calculated that the cost per refugee today to be around 2 500€ per year per person, while work related immigration gave a positive benefit of 4 800€ per year per person. This report however do not account for increase crime, integration initiatives, increased cost to the education system, health care and other things.
It should also be mentioned that only about 1/3 of refugees ever becomes economical self-sufficient.
Parties get goverment funding based on election result, with a minimum floor of 2.5% votes in national elections. This party is way too small for that, and is primarily focused on local election.
We can easier look at conclusion people make about banks and stock options. Will people invest money into index fonds and pension fonds if those fonds invest money into companies that produce and sell weapons to abhorred brutal dictators? What about buying stocks from telecommunication producers who operate in abhorred brutal dictatorships and who helps those dictators to control their population?
To add to the context. The founder of the was the chairman for the youth organization of Vänsterpartiet (English name: The left party), the furthest left party in the Swedish parliament, and he recruited members primarily from the same organization when he was kicked out. The reason he got kicked out was that he was seen praising the Revolutionary Front, a far-left extremist political and militant network in Sweden.
It should be added that the area where they are active is in the local government of Örebro Municipality, a place with a total population of 160,143 people. Looking at the political leanings of parties for a small local government with the lens of national parties might not give a very clear picture. Their strategy is also directed toward local voters, not national voters, through a strategy called the 12% line.
I remember a discussion I had with a English teacher from UK who immigrated to Sweden during the 1990s. They said that in UK, when a government employee would visit a house regarding dept or some other problem, they would bring a large police escort and then they and the neighbourhood would had a big brawl that generally ended with the police winning and then most of the participants would go to the pub. It was just how things worked. The guy were majorly surprised that in Sweden, the government employee could just knock on the door and talk to the person with no police and no brawl.
I would assume that if attacking emergency services is the norm in Northern Ireland, so is police escorts of emergency services. That is not the norm in Sweden, through it has become the norm for certain regions where emergency services no longer feel safe going on an emergency call. The downside is that if the police is delayed, so is the emergency service, and naturally the quality of emergency service is reduce in those locations which some people say is a form of discrimination.
There aren't even 100 000 Somalians living in Sweden, so it would be quite hard to deport 100 000 social welfare-Somalis. People born in Somalia is the 7th largest group of immigrants, and makes up for the largest group if we only look at African nations.
The real number is around half, 67000.
Now if we assume social welfare-Somalis is a derogatory generalization of all kind of immigrates, including non-Somalis, then it is likely to be more than 100 000 immigrants that is on social welfare. They just won't all be Somalis, or even be the majority of them.
What can Iran do if other countries consider Iranian ship as free for the taking as retaliation for Iran attacking ships in the strait of hormuz?
What would Australia do if Iran attacked their embassy? They would kick them out, denying Iran an embassy in Australia. When it comes to this stuff, a tit for tat strategy is generally the common tactic. If you attack peaceful trade ships, then your own trade ships is valid target for retaliation. If you start to threaten ships with ransoms, other nations will do the same.
Invading Iran is a complete different subject compared to boarding trading ships well outside the border of Iran. Historically, a Letter of marque was a very cheap way to manage countries which did not respect your own ships. Some laws are still in the law books regarding how to deal with prize ships, which illustrate how close we are to the time where peaceful traversal of waters was not a given.
One of the biggest trade partner for Iran is China. Will China pay the toll? Will Iran attack their ships? Will China retaliate if they do? If China do not need to pay the toll, which other countries would then be willing to one-sided pay for access to the strait?
Time will tell. I find it very unlikely that other nations will do nothing if nations and companies start to actually pay Iran money. If Iran get money, then the harbor that the Iranian ship goes to also want a cut, and any strait on the way also want their cut, and then why not just demand a cut if they happen to sail by in range of a military ship. Ships are by nature fairly vulnerable to be intercepted, boarded and cargo confiscated. Historically, from around 1300 to 19th century, shipping companies had to have their own army and cannons on board in order to safe guard cargo on the oceans. One could argue that the current period of international peace on the oceans was an abnormality and we are now returning back to normality.
Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.
I suspect it goes to explain why this new bill is bipartisan. That case failed because the plaintiffs did not have a legal standing to sue.
"In a dissent that detailed emails, press conferences, and past decisions, Justice Alito painted the "jawboning" as "blatantly unconstitutional".
Wednesday's ruling, he wrote, "permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think"."
Regardless if one agree with them, it do demonstrate that conservative side think that there is a risk that governments will attempt to persuade platforms to moderate content, and that this is a risk. This new bill seem to make it much easier to give people a legal standing to sue, thus allowing the supreme court to give a different verdict if a similar situation happen again.
In those two immigration systems you are familiar with, what is the difference between permanent residence and naturalizing, and is there any benefit to get naturalizing rather than staying as permanent residence?
Citizens are mostly unconditional, so yes, Swedish citizenship are more permanent. There is discussion around revoking membership from people with double memberships, but it is in legal limbo since it may not be consistent with the constitution.
Permanent Residency were not removed if you moved away. It was also not removed if a person did criminal activity. There was a bit weird middle ground where people retained their permanent residency status, but was expelled from the country due to serious crime.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.