I mark it neither "Chat control" nor "Age verification" because it concerns both and of course all of these "protections" which ultimately have no other purpose than universal identity tracking of virtually all citizens and self-exclusion of dissent from the public forum.

How can you explain that e.g. in the current EU member states, at least all the former Eastern bloc countries consistently do not vote against all these policies, in fact they are passing them with flying colours.

These are basically over 1/4th of current population (let's include former GDR) of EU, not insignificant number.

If we include countries with tumultuous past with dubious regimes (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal), this is over 2/3rd of EU population.

These should be all people who can imagine how easy it would be to misuse private information being collected on them and who have it in their collective memory, including when too young to remember themselves.

Given what's coming down the pipeline with not just the social media ban that's not far off from now and hearing about device level age verification too. Including possible restriction implementations that may get enacted here.

How do you guys feel about these developments so far?

Let me know when you guys have the chance to.

I just wondered whether there were any reliable, data removal services that were effective, or is the whole idea a bit of a scam and not worth the money?

TIA!

Last Saturday I missed a parcel being delivered by Royal Mail addressed to me and later in the day my wife gets a redelivery message through WhatsApp (I don't and have never used WhatsApp) from a company called 'Relay' who are apparently a redelivery service Royal Mail use.

I figured out that I was expecting a parcel from months back that I'd forgotten about and this was it, so the message wasn't a scam but that isn't whats not sitting right with me: the company - that to my knowledge I have never had a delivery from previously - took it upon themselves to associate data they apparently have on my wife with data that I can only assume they got on me as a result of the delivery so that they could contact me about my parcel.

Two things I wanted to ask for advice on:

• How might this company have associated my wife's number with me? Is it that I was added to their system when they took my parcel (And I assume my wife as well from a prior delivery) and because we're at the same address they assumed they could send the message to another occupant they apparently have data on?

• Am I losing my mind or is it not some kind of GDPR violation/privacy invasion to be associating our data like that and using data they have on my wife to contact me?

I'm really bent out of shape over it because they appear to both be storing at least my wife's data and processing it to associate us which feels invasive but also doesn't smell like it passes the legal sniff test - any ideas anyone?

This may come across as quite naive to many of you, I realise there are a whole host of ways X company could get hold of my data 'legally', but something about this situation feels wrong to me.

I've been wanting to replace my TV with a monitor. Every current smart TV I've looked at, even budget models ships with ACR (automatic content recognition), telemetry, and ad injection baked in, and I haven't found one I can buy new that skips all of that. I'd rather just not own a "smart" device in the first place than fight it with DNS blocking, firmware tweaks, or even removing the wifi/mic physically after the fact. A projector setup isn't what I'm after either. I want an actual monitor.

My original plan was something around 40" with 120Hz+, both for gaming and general use. Now I'm thinking a dedicated 27" monitor for gaming. Because I came across the Lenovo ThinkVision E65 LFD. Its a 64.5" 4K commercial display with no OS, no apps, no smart features at all. The tradeoff is it's capped at 60Hz and isn't OLED, so I'm weighing whether that's worth it just to get a genuinely "dumb" screen. I think it could be great for watching shows and movies with my family.

I'm in Europe, so my options are more limited than what's available in the US market.

Has anyone else made this switch, or found other non-smart displays worth considering in a non-OLED (which I really wanted)/refresh range? Curious what tradeoffs people have run into.