“Commission officials stress that the intelligence and law enforcement regime in China does not pass the EU’s standard for privacy protections.”
Western fears about Chinese surveillance occupied the headlines in 2019. Videos introduced Europeans to the different reality of ‘China’s 27,900 eyes’, pointing at the dangers of the extensive measures and the involvement of intelligence agencies. ‘The New Era of Social Control’ was presented as a ‘nimbler form of authoritarianism’ that was ‘capable of exercising unprecedented social control’.
Voices criticized the Chinese approach to data management and the basic principles behind GDPR, such as fairness, purpose limitation and confidentiality. The companies that sold surveillance tools to China’s human rights abusers were condemned by Amnesty International and Co.
Others demanded that the EU made sure that artificial intelligence wouldn’t be used to build up a China-style high-tech surveillance state, for example to ban ‘AI-enabled mass-scale scoring of individuals’.
Fast forward six years to the present and the world couldn’t have changed more.
The EU seems to have taken a 180-turn on the issue of surveillance, because there was not a word of opposition from Brussels when Denmark announced measures that would have done Beijing credit. Even more so, as Copenhagen plans its incoming EU presidency to push the issue forward.
But, as Amnesty pointed out, Denmark’s AI-powered welfare system fuelled mass surveillance and risked discriminating against marginalized groups, whilst eroding individual privacy and undermining human dignity.
The other pet project of the Danish government – forcing messaging platforms to monitor their services for child sexual abuse material – isn’t much more popular, either. For the very same reasons: privacy considerations. Many member states, including Germany and the Netherlands, have already blocked this attempt once, trying to convince Denmark that it was too surveillance-centred.
The aim is noble in both cases: creating a fair, fraud-free and more efficient social security system is just as beneficial to the community as is protecting children online.
Quite a few member states agree though that Denmark ventured too far into the Dark Side, suddenly enjoying the never-before experienced efficiency offered by AI. Experts agree that the new systems monitoring social security fraud is basically a social scoring system, flagging individuals suspected of benefit fraud – the very same thing China was blamed for.
And when the same government eagerly hands similar, AI enhanced surveillance tools to intelligence services, again, in the name of public- and national security, the picture is even more bleak.
The Danish did exactly that.
The Ministry of Justice proposed a legislative change in March 2025, that would grant the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) broad new powers to collect and analyse data about the people in Denmark, even without any prior suspicion of wrongdoing.
Accessible data would be private communication, internet data and digital footprints, both in publicly available databases and governmental resources (think health care and social security – lucky, isn’t it that it’s also getting brand new AI tools). Both for Danish citizens and foreigners, in or outside Denmark.
Basically a ‘just in case’ data collection, followed by automated behavioural profile building – so when it’s necessary, secret services ‘have a file on you’. For five years.
The country that once prided itself on democracy, freedom and transparency is now hiding behind murky algorithms as it quietly strips away its citizens’ rights and builds a systematic and all-encompassing surveillance system.
