They are not. For example, according to Italian Constitution [1], chat control is unconstitutional:
Art. 15
Freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and of every other form of
communication is inviolable.
Limitations may only be imposed by judicial decision stating the reasons and
in accordance with the guarantees provided by the law.
note the "EVERY" other form of communication. (Maybe somebody will be able to twist in a way that makes chat control constitutional, or somebody else will argue that since it is an EU law the constitution doesn't matter, but the spirit is clear)
Until the state itself makes an informed decision on you, based on you religion, political ideas etc, and you are no longer free to make any decision any more, informed or not.
But more than that, even if you had all the information available, it will still be drowned in order of magnitudes higher amounts of counterfeit information, propaganda, lies.
> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.
Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.
It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.
Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.
I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.
I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.
If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.
If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.
The Monero download page requires me to choose my system architecture to get an installer, and insists that I absolutely must "verify the hashes" of the "archive". When I ran the installer, it first identified as "monero-gui-install-win-x64-v0.18.4.0" published by "Unknown", then as "Monero Fluorine Fermi GUI Wallet", and about 3/4 of the way through the setup my antivirus popped up to block it.
I don't think this is effectively available to anyone without deep tech experience, and any non-technical user who's willing to click through this kind of thing is definitely drowning in malware that will steal their crypto.
That is true in very unsophisticated systems. It's not true in zksnark based systems and it's not true on monero.
In any case, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying with crypto I need not ask permission to make a transaction. Whether that transaction should be open to government inspection after the fact is another matter entirely.
Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)
But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.
For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn.
"The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."
That works if meanwhile Google hasn't decided to increase the target api level requirements [1]. In that case you may not be able to just republish the app, and extensive refactoring may be necessary.
Forcing apps using old sdks out of the app store is probably the main reason they do this.
That is only really necessary if your app is using old privacy or security problematic APIs.
Which is usually the root cause of this complaining - "why do I have to refactor my app so it won't demand access to all private photos and documents anymore?!"
Who actually asked for this? It's been nothing but a pointless nuisance to me as a user. Samsung complains at me if I choose to give an app persistent GPS access, in the rare occasion it even lets me. I want my programs to do as much as possible, not be hamstrung.
There’s a few apps where I want to grant broad permissions from the outset, but generally that’s not what I want, especially when it comes to photos, contacts, etc. In most cases there’s no benefit whatsoever to granting e.g. access to my entire photo library and it seriously irritates me to see apps insist on said access.
In fact if I had my way, I’d never see a prompt and permissions would default to “only selected” (collections) and “no access” (location, wifi, etc), with the handful of exceptions having access granted manually.
I gave Telegram access to only a few photos, and it pops up the "give me more access" dialog EVERY SINGLE TIME I open it. Not when I want to send a photo, every time I open the app!
Because the legislation doesn’t require that. And they want even less legislation. I mean, how does one even come up with a car made out of stainless steel with edges sharp like knives.
Rules made long before anyone would come up with electric-only doors outside a sci-fi fantasy. (OT how many "try to push open that deactivated door" does Star Trek have power episode, on average?)
Once Canada is annexed, the fun (insurgency) will start.
Former Canadian citizen will be US citizen with the right to buy weapons, AR-15 and grenade launchers included.
Police and out of duty soldiers will be mowed down in random places all over the country. Martial law may be declared. People's freedom of movement will be restricted. Economy will take a bad turn.
Imagine IRA (Ireland), ETA (Spain) or PKK (Turkey) but with legal ability to get a lot of deadly weapons. I don't think Americans are ready for this.
Greenlanders don't want to become part of the USA afaik, but they know that in the current situation becoming independent means being invaded, sooner or later, by the USA, Russia or China, so I think that the scenario of Greenland trying to become a sovereign nation is less likely now.
As for Canada, although there are a number of Trump supporters that foam at the idea of invading their neighbor, I think that the invasion would be deeply unpopular (a number of people voted for Trump because he was supposed to stop the wars, not start new ones), especially if the Canadian population offer some kind of resistance although who knows, it is just a matter of enough propaganda...
Half of the sons, daughters, and mistresses of Russian leadership and their plutocratic friends enjoy vacationing or living in western Europe, so they will probably replace Putin with somebody else or let Russia lose and run away with their pockets full of money before letting any nuke fly.
[1] https://www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istituzione/costi...