Europe is so heterogeneous that any claims about it as a whole are misleading at best. Germans are probably the most privacy conscious people in the western world, for reasons which should probably be obvious given their history.
Yeah, that's why every morning on the tram I see the average Germans texting on Tinder, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, the most privacy focused apps on the planet. Sounds very privacy conscious, handing your most intimate data to US & Chinese companies.
Also, A lot of German are really into digital banks and brokers lately like N26, Scalable Capital, etc. which report everything to the Government authorities anyway, so I'm not buying the whole privacy angle. Cash usage at small businesses is mostly to enable tax fraud.
Germany is well known for giving support to political endeavors which help to ensure the privacy of citizens. Try looking around Munich on Street View.
It is a breath of fresh air for privacy focused people.
I know German people who will completely quit or at least strongly avoid contact to people who have an account at such services.
Cash is still king[2].
Germans care about their privacy - maybe not everybody has clear all the implications of modern applications, but you cannot dismiss the care of privacy with just saying that your experience on a bus doesn't match this.
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ISOC_CI_AC_I_...
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ISOC_CI_AC_I_...
[2]: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/payment-be...
That's mostly due to German older generations being tech-illiterate and skewing the statistics, like the boomer politicians who want to have their internet "printed", and my 50 year old ex-manager who refused to use Jira and had me send him a weekly email with the tasks in progress and their status.
On the other side of the spectrum, if you look at Germans under 30-35 they're all super connected via privacy shoddy apps like Telegram.
>Cash is still king
>[...]if you ever being to Berlin, and you want to go to a restaurant, you better bring cash. No body accepts cards or electronic payments there.
That's only due to rampant tax fraud in Germany's gastronomy sector and other small businesses.
So privacy there means privacy from the taxman, which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of (not small) taxes and support the burden of the social system.
Of course, there is no way to know exactly how much tax fraud there is, but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high: https://www.taxobservatory.eu/repository/estimating-internat...
No citation, just my anecdotal time working in the gastronomy sector as a student and that of several of my friends as well.
Seeing the owners at the end of the night carrying home buckets full of cash out of the restaurant that will never be seen in any tax declarations is a common sight, and will just be dumped into cars and real estate later.
This isn't restricted just to gastronomy and hospitality either. Lots of businesses deals in Germany are done on a handshake, with sums declared in the contract at, say 10k Euros, with the actual payment for the services being something like 50k Euros, meaning only 10k gets taxed, the rest is tax free for you. You get the point.
In case you're wondering why real este buying prices in Germany are so high and seem completely disconnected from the median wages, that's one of the reasons why. Lots of undeclared black money sloshing around the economy looking for a safe parking space.
>but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high
Meh, irrelevant. That statistics looks at offshore untaxed wealth. Most small business owners dealing in cash won't have accounts in Bermuda or Panama for that.
You (as a government) want people to be honest with their taxes? Set up the taxation laws so that "being honest" is incredibly easy. Instead Germany has one of the most convoluted taxation laws in the world.
This alone should provide strong evidence that all the talk about "tax fraud" is just some pretense to adopt new surveillance laws and/or make them socially acceptable to adopt.
Simplifying tax bureaucracy will not happen in Germany as it's the bread and butter of many companies who make their living on helping you deal with the complex system, and if the system were to be reformed, all these parasites would go bust. That aint gonna happen.
Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for. They prefer having a system where that enables some businesses to dodge taxes masquerading as "privacy", so the politicians can't take this away and still expect to get reelected.
In 2005, Angela Merkel (CDU) gave the campaign promise to simplify the taxation system immensely (using a system that the renowned export Paul Kirchhof (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kirchhof) developed). Independently, at the same time, Friedrich Merz, Merkel's "frenemy" at the CDU, independently made his own proposals to strongly simplify the taxation system ("Bierdeckelsteuer" [beer coaster tax]; meaning that for a typical citizen the whole tax declaration should fit on a beer coaster).
I know a lot of young people who voted for the CDU in the 2005 election exactly because of the ideas of Paul Kirchhof to simplify the taxation system despite otherwise not being attracted to the election goals of the CDU.
In 2005, the CDU became the strongest party in the German Federal Parliament. But Angela Merkel and the CDU broke this campaign promise. In other words: these politicians are nothing but mere fraudsters who deserve to rot in the jail for breaking such a campaign promise.
Thus: The problem is not that the Germans did not vote for this, but the problem is that the politicians are fraudsters breaking election promises and thus belong in jail instead of the parliament.
Just FYI, here I pay 10€ for unlimited calls, text, and data, and 25GB roaming abroad per month.
Sometimes it's better to just say nothing.
Living in Germany, I know no one from my circles who uses Payback. This is in my gut feeling also a central reason why such loyalty programs push/nudge so hard to get people as customers - because so few people want them.
The only time when such loyalty programs were tried out by quite some people in Germany was when in 2001 the Rabattgesetz [discount law; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabattgesetz] was abolished. Then, for a short time, quite some people tried out the now upcoming loyalty programs, but soon stopped using them because quite some people were very vocal about telling the privacy implications of these loyalty programs.
"Will you pay cash or with credit card?"
"Why, cash of course!"
"Thanks. Do you have a Payback card?"
"Certainly."
> "Certainly."
Rather: "Thanks. Do you have a Payback card?" - the person holds a speech about the privacy implications of Payback when there is a long queue at the checkout. :-D
I don't think that's the case, especially among the younger generations which are largely English speaking and grew up with the internet.
Also, for example, if you looked at the US in detail you'd find just as many cultural difference between individuals states, it's likely true of any large country or federation.
In Germany and as far as I am aware also in France and Spain - all three are among the largest EU countries - the younger generation is hardly largely English-speaking. Only the more educated people (who studied at a university) are typically somewhat confident in their English, and at least in these three countries English is nevertheless only used as a second/"helper" language.
With UK having left the EU, the only EU countries where English is an official language are Ireland and Malta; in both of these countries English is only one of the official languages, not the only one.
I agree. While I don’t have any direct contact with younger people, our fantasy stores went from being 50/50 English/German products to having 99% in German.
(FWIW, first-time university students have consistently made up >50% of Germans in their respective age cohort for the past decade, so most ≈20–30 year-olds are in that university-educated English-speaking group.) https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
> And assuming German-English bilinguals are indifferent to the language
Well, I stopped going to those stores because I prefer English, but I’m not exactly representative ;)
Have you been to Europe outside of its big touristy capitals? To describe the younger generation as "largely English-speaking" is absurd. I'm from a medium-sized city in northern France. Go there and try speaking English to the young people in the street. See where that gets you.
I'm here in coastal Croatia and English ability is common, if mixed, with younger people being mostly proficient. Of course the French are in a class of their own when it comes to (not) speaking English, but I'd still posit there are plenty of young French people who speak or understand English to some degree. If I needed help on your streets with only English I'm sure there would be someone who would be able to help me out.
During the pandemic, for example, remote work tools were routinely criticised or even banned in Germany due to their supposed privacy implications - with schools and public administration often having been the worst offenders.
There were civil servants who were "working from home", but in fact couldn't do any actual work because they were not allowed to access their department's intranet from home.
There were even teachers who refused to use video conferencing solutions for teaching their classes.
While some of that criticism regarding privacy issues with some of those tools might even have been valid, without suggesting a viable alternative, such criticism is pointless and detrimental, because all it achieves is to promote inertia and the status quo.