You’re thinking about about it all wrong. Treat it like a 3€ per month sub and a 2€ donation to one of the leading lights/centers of expertise for digital freedom and privacy. Or a €4.50 fee and a €.50 donation. Or €2.50 each way.

I wonder whether it ever occurs to normies that surrendering PII in order to transact amounts to hidden cost inflation

Alfred emerged from the densest part of the eucalptus grove. All around him, his tiny bots unobtrusively kept pace. Every one was in violation of local law, containing not a single chip in thrall to the Department of Homeland Security. While Vaz continued to play Bollywood exec through the public net, these devices provided him with his own network and countermeasures.

Rainbows End (Vernor Vinge)

The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for “researchers and innovators”

‘We are concerned that if data and weights are FOSS, people will develop their own tools, which will work for them by definition and not us, thereby increasing people’s autonomy from us. So the data will not be publicly available’

Vendor Electronics Show