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Why are there so many Germans on Lemmy?
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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Asklemmy
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Hmm that's fascinating. I didn't realize you guys had such a strong cultural tendency towards privacy. Do you think there's a specific thing that caused it, or has it always been this way?
Most of this privacy fetish is purely performative though. The Schufa is a dystopian data collector with information on every German and despite a token focus on data privacy politicians pass more and more surveillance laws like using Palantir for the police and crackdowns on free speech and protesting in general.
Half of Google streetview is blurred here
I think it took us 4 or 5 years of frog boiling until street view cars were allowed here (and only once google made it possible to have your home be censored)
Hmm I don't know actually, but now I'm curious too. From quick search:
https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/coronavirus-germany-privacy/
Interesting, although seeing as being sensitive about privacy isn't as big in other post communist countries (at least not here in Czechia), I assume it must just be a generic cultural trait
Well the German Democratic Republic is unique among the former USSR countries in that it was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter already had a strong focus on privacy laws resulting from the Nazi time (meaning there was strong mistrust towards the state, but Nazis trying to hide in plain sight was obviously also relevant). But when the sheer amount of information the communist intelligence services were storing on their citizens became known after reunification this pre-existing privacy bias was put into overdrive, it confirmed all the worst fears west Germans already had about the state becoming too powerful.