this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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The Dutch postal service treats letters and packages differently, and electronic greeting cards are processed as letters. They probably didn't formally recognize letters could contain electronics.
Dutch bureaucracy also tends to have a lot of tolerance/leeway (gedoogbeleid), where rather than fix bad policies everybody just sort of agrees to do things a "reasonable" way. Attempting to fix bad policies can be seen as an expression of mistrust, a threat to whatever people have been getting away with so far, or general narc/snitch behavior. So even if someone realized that electronic greeting cards could be a threat vector, it would have been rude/socially isolating of them to bring it up and deny everybody on board their cute electronic greeting cards from back home.
The Polder Model strikes again!