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>restaurants in Germany were required to track customer's information including addresses Ironic they went along with this considering how chest-pumping German

>restaurants in Germany were required to track customer's information including addresses Ironic they went along with this considering how chest-pumping Germans are about their government being all about protecting their citizens' "privacy". >They were sued after the fact and lost, but got nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Government workers don't care about doing a good job since if they break the rules they won't get fired and the fines are not paid from their pockets but from the taxpayers pockets anyway so there's no incentive to be competent at your job.

brookst 2y ago
It’s always a mistake to generalize about a population as large as “employees of the German government”. Some people are meticulous about their jobs. Some are not. Both types are present in any large organization.
Cu3PO42 2y ago
I'm not really all that surprised. Public opinion is easily swayed with good marketing. The government mandated contact tracing, but not how it was to be implemented. There was a publicly developed open-source app for contact tracing that was perfectly privacy preserving. Unfortunately, many restaurants instead used a commercial solution that was none of these things. What it did have was support from a mildly famous German musician and great lobbying. Most people didn't care, they just wanted to go to the restaurant.
bitwize 2y ago
The German government, and maybe to a lesser extent the EU more generally, feels that the privacy of citizens from corporations (especially foreign ones, especially American tech ones) is important to preserve and protect. Privacy from the government is a different matter. The government, due to its being duly elected by the people, has an implicit right to pry into people's affairs if such prying can be justified as serving the public interest. It's quite a different attitude than the USA. The USA is almost unique in being individualist to what some might consider an extremist degree, to the point where if the government intends to violate someone's fundamental rights, they may do so only under very limited circumstances and must document everything and prove that those circumstances had been met. In most of the democratic world, individual rights are just one factor that needs to be balanced against public safety, public order, etc. and the government has much wider latitude to violate even constitutionally protected rights on its own say-so. This is how you get German prosecutors on 60 Minutes, grinning and laughing as they describe the shock people undergo as they are arrested and their computers confiscated and searched over literal mean tweets. For the Germans, it's normal -- necesssary, even, to have a functional society. To Americans it's abhorrent.

brookst 2y ago

It’s always a mistake to generalize about a population as large as “employees of the German government”. Some people are meticulous about their jobs. Some are not. Both types are present in any large organization.

Cu3PO42 2y ago

I'm not really all that surprised. Public opinion is easily swayed with good marketing. The government mandated contact tracing, but not how it was to be implemented. There was a publicly developed open-source app for contact tracing that was perfectly privacy preserving. Unfortunately, many restaurants instead used a commercial solution that was none of these things. What it did have was support from a mildly famous German musician and great lobbying. Most people didn't care, they just wanted to go to the restaurant.

bitwize 2y ago

The German government, and maybe to a lesser extent the EU more generally, feels that the privacy of citizens from corporations (especially foreign ones, especially American tech ones) is important to preserve and protect. Privacy from the government is a different matter. The government, due to its being duly elected by the people, has an implicit right to pry into people's affairs if such prying can be justified as serving the public interest. It's quite a different attitude than the USA. The USA is almost unique in being individualist to what some might consider an extremist degree, to the point where if the government intends to violate someone's fundamental rights, they may do so only under very limited circumstances and must document everything and prove that those circumstances had been met. In most of the democratic world, individual rights are just one factor that needs to be balanced against public safety, public order, etc. and the government has much wider latitude to violate even constitutionally protected rights on its own say-so. This is how you get German prosecutors on 60 Minutes, grinning and laughing as they describe the shock people undergo as they are arrested and their computers confiscated and searched over literal mean tweets. For the Germans, it's normal -- necesssary, even, to have a functional society. To Americans it's abhorrent.