I moved from the UK to Germany in 1996 and back then the banking & payment was just sooo backwards. Some stores were incredibly anachronistic (Lerche springs to mind - since closed down)
Sorry to hear it's still the same.
Sorry to hear it's still the same.
We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.
The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.
Being free to dodge the tax man is incredibly valuable for small business and individuals in Germany as a lot of wealth is built on tax fraud. That's the kind of privacy people mean.
The people who are very vocal about (data) privacy in Germany (which are quite some people, though not all) indeed typically try to avoid such services.
And there's a difference between being vocal and actually walking the walk and doing anything about it.
Germany has 80+ million people. Having nobody on Instagram/Tiktok would be unthinkable.
However, historically speaking, this hesitation to have privacy over "convenience" is implemented still everywhere.
You can't just minimize it with "people want to evade tax", although it's also true.
Exactly.
This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prosecuted). There still exist lots of contemporary witnesses who can tell you what being potentially be surveilled means in the day-to-day life.
In comparison to the NSDAP and SED, I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl (which actually ended a bit over 25 years ago) a dictatorship is a bit too harsh... /s
I fixed my mistake. :-)
East Germany (ended in 1990), Third Reich (ended in 1945), German Monarchy (ended in 1918)
That's some level of f** up.
No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.
At the same time, they had an early form of mobile Internet since they year 2000 (when most of the West didn't have internet at all, let alone mobile internet): https://www.wired.com/2000/06/its-a-wireless-world-in-japan/
Japan is ranked 4th/20th vs Germany's 23th/35th for mobile/fixed internet speed, so much better overall (and anecdotal evidence is that internet in Germany's countryside is rock bottom).
So Japan rather seems to me to _want_ to do their own thing (at least when it comes to preference for cash, although I agree that still faxing things is strange), compared to Germany which _cannot_, for various reasons.
[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...