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Street View features places as far off the beaten path as the International Space Station, gas extraction platforms in the North Sea and the coral reefs of West Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia. In June 2012, it had mapped 5 million miles of roads in 39 countries by its 10th anniversary in May 2017, the total was 10 million miles in 83 countries. Launched in the US in 2007, Google Street View’s mapping of interactive roadside panoramas has since expanded to cover most of the world. Image: Google Maps “A million-fold violation”Ĭase in point: Google Street View’s German debacle. The larger German cities have been mapped – Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden and others – but the rest of the country is a blank, compared to the Benelux countries and France (to the west) and the Czech Republic (to the east) Germany seems in no hurry to catch the digitization train, when other countries are stations ahead, and generating measurable benefits. If there’s one thing Germans value even more than efficiency, it’s - you guessed it - privacy. A cashless society would be more transparent and efficient, but also a lot less private. Why? Again, an intense desire for privacy and an instinctive distrust of surveillance. In the Netherlands, it was just 46 percent.īrits, Danes or Swedes can go for months without handling cash.
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In 2016, 80 percent of all point of sale transaction in Germany were made in notes and coins rather than via card. While Germany’s macro-economy relies on high-tech to maintain its global pole position, on a micro-economic level, good old-fashioned cash is still king. Meanwhile, Google has cornered more than 90 percent of the search engine market in Germany, and close to half of all Germans have a Facebook account.Įxample two: privacy trumps efficiency. Yes, Germans are instinctively distrustful of big tech companies such as Google and Facebook. As a result, the inexorable advance of digitization is viewed with a mixture of fatalism and misgiving.Įxample one: Germany’s split personality when it comes to social media. But Nie wieder is difficult to maintain in a world that increasingly mines and monetises data. Image: TeaMeister / CC BY 2.0 Missing the trainįoreign firms operating in Germany have to adjust to some of the strictest privacy laws in the world. Germany is high-tech when it comes to transport – cars, trains – but when it comes to digitisation, not so much
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Image: Dooffy / CC0 1.0 Informational self-determination The EU’s GDPR, adopted in May 2018, builds on Germany’s tradition of strict privacy laws Why? Because Germans carry the trauma of not one, but two totalitarian systems in their recent past: the fascist Third Reich, and communist East Germany. For Americans and Chinese, that value declines to single-digit figures. For the average Brit, the privacy of that information is only worth $59. On the other hand, Germans are extremely possessive of their personal data - and are shocked by the readiness with which Americans (and others) share their names, addresses, friends’ lists, and purchase histories online.Īccording to research presented in the Harvard Business Review, the average German is willing to pay as much as $184 to protect their personal health data. While public nudity is a big no-no in the United States for example, Germany has a long tradition with what is known as FKK – short for Freikörperkultur, or “Free Body Culture.” Certain beaches and areas of city parks are dedicated to nude sunbathing, and even Nacktwanderung (“nude rambling”) is a thing. Image: FKK Gelande Sudstrand / CC BY 2.0 Totalitarian traumas “Social nudity,” for health and vigor and to commune with nature, is very accepted in Germany.