I live here. Privacy awareness is very high, compared to everywhere else I've personally been. Nobody likes having their picture taken, nobody likes being filmed, nobody likes answering questions for strangers. And they'll tell it to your face too.
Go onto Google street maps for Germany and see how far you get.
And yet, people are amazingly complacent în other aspects ("War halt immer so"). For example, your apartment's doorbell has to have your last name on it: someone with an unusual name could conceivably be tracked down just by postal code. For another example, when I was blogging, I had to display my full name and address in an Impressum on the website - dox myself, so to speak.
And, of course, the Berlin government forces people to register their address, and allows everyone to query it, because why wouldn't they:
People constantly complain about the greedy tech companies collecting data where ever they can and proceed to complain about the strict privacy regulations in the EU in their next sentence. Forcing private individuals to put their full name and address into the imprint of their personal website, which often enough isn’t even run for profit, seems absolutely absurd and very publishing hostile.
To me it’s more and more starting to seem like people don’t actually care about their privacy, they just want to be against something.
Wait...so people can decide which facts about their life they want to remain private and which they're fine with you knowing? I thought that was the whole idea of self-determination. Where's the catch?
Your building's facade is whatever you decide it to be. It doesn't matter what other people think, it's not up to them. So, likewise, you're not the one to say that someone's building's facade is not private. A major part of respect for other people's privacy is letting them decide what they're private about. I mean, sure, lots of impolite things you may be doing are still legal. Laws don't define courtesy.
In my case it is actually the other way around. I had no problem with street view but would never list my number in the public phone book.
I selectively decide what to attribute to my name as long as I am able to. So that I for example decided that I am OK with the need to have an imprint on my website and my full name and address being tied to what I write there.
I understand that this isn't for everybody, but I decided that I was okay with attaching my name to my writing.
But I am not okay with random businesses being allowed to spam me via online generated profiles without me knowing or consenting.
I know there are a lot of things that still should be massively better in Germany. But knowing how easy it is to comply with the GDPR and relevant other regulations I actually like them.
Uh...whose last name would you put on that doorbell? Someone else's who doesn't live there?
I've never heard of a delivery person say they wouldn't delivery an item because there was no name on the bell or that the bell name wasn't consistent with the recipient, and those guys are experts at excuses for why they can't/won't make a delivery!
That's exactly what our post will do to you. (And not just because they don't know what doorbell to use if there's no name on it.)
Same principle as with password hashes were you might prefer a slow hashing function with a work factor.
I don't necessarily agree with the streetview restriction, but also don't really mind not letting Google make pictures.
You actually don't need to put your name on your doorbell, but that at least has very practical advantages for yourself.
Berlin is a failure of government since time immemorial but I am not familiar with this law.
Meldepflicht is in all of Germany, it's not a Berlin thing.
> and allows everyone to query it, because why wouldn't they:
This is highly controversial, for exactly the reasons you might think.
However, this is an "Einzelauskunft", so you get one address per query, and you are not allowed to trade in those addresses or use them for advertising. Also, if you want more detailed info, you have to provide a valid reason for wanting them.
ephemerality. If you think your neighbor is violating your privacy you can take it up with them, you think you can take on Google? There is no incoherence here. If you live in a neighborhood, there are of course certain natural limits to your privacy given that you're part of a community.
But digital privacy laws first and foremost protect citizens from entities well beyond their control, they protect them from automated processing, storage of their data beyond their own borders, and privacy erosion in ways they cannot control and at a scale that creates entirely new problems. Of course nobody has absolute privacy, everyone can overhear a conversation, but this does not end with a surveillance state or control society. Corporate entities or governments processing billions of messages in real time does.
When you get to the point where judges and lawmakers have, more likely than not, personal experience of threatening emails containing private information, there's a lot of incentive to reduce the amount of data collection - and correspondingly, a lot of popular support for the idea.
That courts are ruling against this, in whatever way, is still a good sign.