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> personal data has a very high degree of protection under the constitution, see Germany's history Forward to recent years, not an insignificant amount of peop

> personal data has a very high degree of protection under the constitution, see Germany's history Forward to recent years, not an insignificant amount of people start to hate this data protection nonsense because they have to pass documents across even government offices, which could happen automatically in a digitized world, while adtech always manages to track all the things.

Xylakant 4y ago
That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though. The primary issue limiting digitization of government services is federalization. A lot of software is just incompatible, outdated, broken. There's no central agency that can enforce standards across the states or (gasp!) municipalities - every city essentially can use whatever and buy wherever. There are no economies of scale leveraged, no central standards, few qualified technical and management personnel on the buyers side. And the federal government has no mandate to enforce any of this. Contrast that with the UK, which created gov.uk as the central authority on digital citizen services.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  > That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though. It's a super weird one as well. There's no extra special data protection rules for digital data vs. data on paper. Are they admitting they violate privacy laws already? Or do they want to change the information flow while going paperless? If so, why, and why is it necessary to go digital at all?
  - c4mpute 4y ago
    In some cases (taxes mostly) digital data has been associated with government-wide identifiers that make profiling citizens across all government agencies possible and easy. Linking even more data automatically and without asking the affected citizen to those identifiers rightfully gets pushback. Paper often uses the same identifiers, but being paper, isn't automatically linked to all the other papers in other filing cabinets somewhere...
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Yup, it should not be surprising that the 1978 SAFARI scandal that resulted in the creation of the French data protection authority happened when the government attempted (and had to stop) to link various then paper databases into a centralized one through a single social security number.
- srrr 4y ago
  While I support almost everything you said there is a national standards body and some standards. See: 1) https://www.fitko.de/ https://www.fitko.de/ 2) https://www.xoev.de/ https://www.xoev.de/ 3) https://www.xrepository.de/ https://www.xrepository.de/
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    You are correct, by now there are some standards. But look at the clusterfuck that the current digitization initiative is: for each service to be offered, a different municipality is responsible. Instead of all municipalities funding a common shared institution. We’re seeing entirely predictable results. :sigh:
c4mpute 4y ago
Yes, but actually that isn't due to data protection. It is due to the lazy bureaucracy using data protection as an excuse to have the citizens do their work for them.

Xylakant 4y ago

That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though. The primary issue limiting digitization of government services is federalization. A lot of software is just incompatible, outdated, broken. There's no central agency that can enforce standards across the states or (gasp!) municipalities - every city essentially can use whatever and buy wherever. There are no economies of scale leveraged, no central standards, few qualified technical and management personnel on the buyers side. And the federal government has no mandate to enforce any of this. Contrast that with the UK, which created gov.uk as the central authority on digital citizen services.

orangeoxidation 4y ago
> That's not a data protection problem, however. No data protection law forbids digitization of government services. It's a common excuse, though. It's a super weird one as well. There's no extra special data protection rules for digital data vs. data on paper. Are they admitting they violate privacy laws already? Or do they want to change the information flow while going paperless? If so, why, and why is it necessary to go digital at all?
- c4mpute 4y ago
  In some cases (taxes mostly) digital data has been associated with government-wide identifiers that make profiling citizens across all government agencies possible and easy. Linking even more data automatically and without asking the affected citizen to those identifiers rightfully gets pushback. Paper often uses the same identifiers, but being paper, isn't automatically linked to all the other papers in other filing cabinets somewhere...
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yup, it should not be surprising that the 1978 SAFARI scandal that resulted in the creation of the French data protection authority happened when the government attempted (and had to stop) to link various then paper databases into a centralized one through a single social security number.
srrr 4y ago
While I support almost everything you said there is a national standards body and some standards. See: 1) https://www.fitko.de/ https://www.fitko.de/ 2) https://www.xoev.de/ https://www.xoev.de/ 3) https://www.xrepository.de/ https://www.xrepository.de/
- Xylakant 4y ago
  You are correct, by now there are some standards. But look at the clusterfuck that the current digitization initiative is: for each service to be offered, a different municipality is responsible. Instead of all municipalities funding a common shared institution. We’re seeing entirely predictable results. :sigh:

c4mpute 4y ago

Yes, but actually that isn't due to data protection. It is due to the lazy bureaucracy using data protection as an excuse to have the citizens do their work for them.