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> Are people in Germany more critical of Google? I somehow don’t believe that…

For historical reasons (NS, Stasi) Germans value their privacy very high. Google is collecting a lot of data and therefore they are critical. 10 years ago, before Chrome vs. Firefox it was IE vs. Opera. This is also the reason why still a lot of Germans avoid using credit cards.

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It may be a factor, but it is no the root and the concept is not privacy, though. The root is the 1983 supreme court decision around informational self-determination. The right has constitutional rank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...

Privacy is a part of that, but not all of it.

A second cultural aspect is that Germans tend to have higher trust into the state, but lower trust in companies when it comes to such subjects, while in the US, this is reversed.

Yeah that's right, but people also use Google to search and use Windows on the desktop.

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