Denmark is very liberal in some ways but very much not in others. MitID -- digital id-- is a gateway to everything and is very much gated in terms of access; it took me months to sort out. It's a crime to not tell the state where you live, or to have too many people living in your house (I'd love to know what happens if you give birth on a "full" house -- is there a grace period, or do you have to move?). The work laptop I have been issued with is filled with invasive spyware that no British university employee would tolerate, and it is run (very well) as a benign dictatorship. You can't get a phone SIM card without personal registration. The tax agency know exactly to the øre how much money you received and what you spent it on in a given year as basically every transaction is recorded.
I'm not complaining that much about it -- you have a fantastic social security system, low inequality, high pay and high taxes, leading to a happy and well educated population and great food (no upf!) -- but it is a vision of the 1960s nanny state that really does think it knowd best.
You forget to exclude it from the law that legalize pornography. Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography, so obviously there where a bunch of, should we say "edge cases" that the lawmakers forgot to think about.
The Danish national television made a documentary, there's also a short article: https://www.dr.dk/om-dr/programmer-og-koncerter/candy-film-d... you can probably just run it through Google translate. The worst part is that it took like 10 - 11 years to fix.
So that's exactly how it is in Switzerland and people still say it's the best place in the world. Maybe sometimes the trust in the authorities is also warranted, right? Just keep them in check all the time, it's the only way to keep that trust - or you have this happening.
I mean Singapore is a pretty nice place to stay in too, but it's still not super free and pretty authoritarian. There are tons of factors that make a place "nice" to be in. In my experience though, at least Danemark is a bit of an odd place. It looks nice for Danes but it's a very monocultural place. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that was a bit apparent to me from an outsider's pov.
Not sure about the laptop with spyware, that's mostly illegal, though some security software could easily be used to spy on users if the company ignores the rules.
A lot of the stuff the government registeres about an individual is required to ensure that things runs as smoothly and efficiently as they do, even if Danes will frequently complain that the government is anything but smooth and efficient. There was always an understanding and laws protecting that data from being misused. Those rules have slowly been eroding over the past 20 years or so, by increasingly zealots politicians seeking to be "tough on crime and misuse of government services (i.e. brown people not working and living on social welfare)".
Illegal access to information about citizens are pretty frequent, yet our politicians don't seem to ever wanting to back down from collection and analysing data. They are either not smart enough to see the dangers or they are deliberately attempting to create a surveillance state.
I'm not complaining that much about it -- you have a fantastic social security system, low inequality, high pay and high taxes, leading to a happy and well educated population and great food (no upf!) -- but it is a vision of the 1960s nanny state that really does think it knowd best.