Germans are NOT privacy conscious or cautious - see SCHUFA, Rundfunkbeitrag debt collection, countless Inkasso, Payback, applying for apartment rental, invasive copyright predators. They simply hate anything which smells internet. Germans hate the internet.

You are both kind of right. I would say that we Germans like our privacy perhaps more than some others, but that we do have many blind spots and are generally not well educated about the issues with Facebook and similar. There is also a difference between the uninformed young user (useds) and the people, who have been around long enough and have an attention span long enough to recognize the patterns.

I'd say that Germans are repeatedly goated into hating or fearing one thing or another because media randomly pick up talking points from activists and then try to outdo each other by running that story to death while stirring up a public outcry. Google Street View was just unlucky enough to fall victim to one of these public bashing cycles.

Google Street View would've been illegal anyway. It's legal to take pictures of public spaces, but only if taken from the height of the average human.

Street View had cameras that were quite a bit taller and could see over fences and hedges.

Google Street View is actually legal in Germany. The European Court of Human Rights has finally ruled that taking pictures of houses does not violate any personal rights. Faces and car license plates are blurred, so these don't pose any issues either.

The court ruling only applies if the pictures are taken at eye level, which is why older street view images can't be accessed (the first time they rolled it out, they used cameras at a height of over 3m).

This was an expected judgement all the time.

The height restriction is as people have a reasonable expectation of privacy behind their hedges or fences in their own backyard.

When I was traveling across Europe, I had hard time taking photos of regular houses that I liked. People will get out and ask why I was photographing.

Maybe it is the way it is because Germans like it that way, not everyone needs to have photo of their house. Not necessarily hating the internet.

Also, I hated the fact that Germany did not have Street View, used it extensively at other places to pick neighbourhoods to go or not to go.

When I asked people I met how comes you don’t have Street View here, they all said that they liked their privacy and it has to do with the times when the government was watching everyone, so they are more cautious about it.

Germans say they like their privacy. Germans also use WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Chrome and Windows.

Germans may be more likely than Americans to think of "privacy" as something they want to be protected, but that doesn't at all translate to a cultural understanding of data protection. We don't want to be "spied on" but that only translates into an expectation of legislature, not into much real activism.

There was a short-lived popular support of the Pirate Party around free culture, privacy and transparency but as someone involved at the time I have to confess for most people this was mostly fueled by fears of losing the ability to listen to music and watch videos prior to the rise of Netflix and music streaming services.

There's an old cultural cliché of Germany being personified by a tired man with a nightcap as a joke about Germans being politically unmotivated but regardless of why that continues to be the case, it still very much describes how it feels if you try to motivate Germans about any issue beyond a few performative protests.

That's just what they tend to think. From a closer outside view Germans are not too picky with their data. As someone mentioned above, to many private companies who are allowed to access, process and use your data.

> This probably won't fly in Germany as Germans are very privacy cautious.

After having lived in Germany for ~7 years this statement always makes me laugh.

Some examples:

* Names on doorbells (yes, visible from the street).

* People using "loyalty cards" left and right, letting the merchants track their behaviour even if they pay with cash.

* Giving a stack of papers (including ID copy, salary statements etc) to a real estate owner to apply for a rental.

Truth is, once registered at an address in Germany one is fully transparent to and trackable by all domestic actors - public, malicious, predatory. Any privacy hysteria in Germany boils down to one of: "Americans will watch us" or "Slavs will steal our possesions". Then there is the cherry on the top "Slavs will use American system to steal our possesions".

Well, the Little Father Of The Russians -- pretty much an Über-Slav, no? -- already used American and British systems to steal a British referendum and an American election, so the cherry-on-top Germans seem to be the ones who got it right.

Not sure if serious or... heh.

> * Names on doorbells (yes, visible from the street).

You need these because somehow the concept of apartment numbers does not exist. As a result, mail and food delivery in large apartment buildings is interesting as well.

It seems pretty bizarre compared to all other countries I've ever sent mail to.

> * People using "loyalty cards" left and right, letting the merchants track their behaviour even if they pay with cash.

I'd argue that there is a pretty bimodal distribution of the population when it comes to privacy: Some people don't care at all and will use these cards, while others will fight every single bit of data stored about them tooth and nail.

> * Giving a stack of papers (including ID copy, salary statements etc) to a real estate owner to apply for a rental.

What's the problem here? Paper is inherently safe, unlike digital data. /s

Well, at least faxes have been officially declared equally safe (or unsafe) as email, which hopefully will finally kill them off as the communications technology of choice of the administration.