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Comment by someweirdperson | Hacker News Reader

> technology/digitalization

This isn't held back by the bigger industries but by entrenched boundaries of responsibilities in the administration (defined in the regulations), data protection, and over-engineering.

Latest example: Warning the population. Instead of simply sending SMS to all active phones in an area, it has to be cell broadcast, which doesn't work on old phones. The reason seems to be (information in media is... limited) that sending SMS would not provide a way to send a cancel/warning-end message. That's only possible with cell broadcast. And that hasn't been used so far due to data protection concerns (there's a list of phones that have been warned, i.e. were in the affected area).

We cannot solve things the simple way.

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Oh, it aboslutely is held back by creative lobbying. Back in late 90s / early 2000s, Telekom (recently privatized telecom monopolist and owner of the landline network) lobbied hard against building up a fibre network by over selling wire based DSL using existing copper lines. Germany still pays for this.

Cell Broadcast is part of GSM since 1995. It's the phone manufacturers' fault that it doesn't work properly. Other countries have been using it for years now.

SMS also gets ignored all the time since spam and fraud over it is rampant nowadays.

> spam and fraud over it is rampant nowadays

My mobil phone number has existed since the beginning of time. It is listed in the public phone book. It was on my private web site for a long time. I've never not handed it over to any sign-up that needed a phone number.

I cannot remeber receiving any spam and/or fraud SMS, ever.

Maybe I'm just lucky, or the report of huge amounts of spam/fraud SMS is elsewhere, but not in Germany.

The only reason SMS spam exists is that it's legal. Why is it so, if not for lobbying?

Data protection sounds like a huge brainwashing that Germans have been submitted to. At my work we analyze driving data, but our internal portal cannot be made public (with public I mean accessible within the company's intranet) because there might be people and cars in the video and this would violate their data protection rights.

In the end everything need some extra layers of bureaucracy to comply with the laws or is simply not done. And the funny part is that many think this is how it works in other countries too.

The reason cell broadcast hadn‘t been used in Germany was a desire not to “burden” the telco providers with the implementation. I’m sure they lobbied against it.

Germany went so far as to request a change in EU legislation that required cell broadcast to be used.

After the last warning test day was disastrous, it was decided to implement it after all.

This wasn't done because of a failed test. Only after over 100 people drowned in their homes in July 2021 because every single layer of the government failed to warn people about flooding they decided to do something.

They decided not warn. Whether or not lives could have been saved had they attempted to warn we'll probably never know.

This is not correct. A major of a town activated the town's sirens but because the only state-wide protocol in place was for citizens to return home or stay inside and turn on radio or TV, this was counterproductive. Plus, public radio and TV only started reporting after dozens of people were already dead.

It was a complete failure on all fronts where the federal and state governments then tried to blame part-time mayors afterwards for not being experts in catastrophe management.

Well, to be fair, I liked the way it was done. It was loud and dragged attention immediately - I'm pretty sure if it was an SMS I wouldn't even notice for hours. The only drawback is that once you acknowledge the alarm, it's gone, there is no place to read it again.

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