P ublic Ch oices

Private Germans

Te Germans are a deeply private people. Tat’s not just because of their political history in the last century. I think it comes from something deeper in their soul. My German grandfather-in-law jumped ship in the United States in 1923 and brought with him an abiding sense of privacy. “You mustn’t tell people that,” our Opa used to say, wagging his crooked, disapproving, and protective ﬁnger. “No one needs to know that.” Ger- mans are hardly alone in grappling with issues surrounding privacy. But the debate in Germany is more strident than anywhere else I can ﬁnd, making it an ideal laboratory in which to study our longing for privacy amid the inexorable shift to publicness brought on by the social net. Google Maps’ Street View has caused quite the fuss in the country. Since Google’s camera-equipped cars took to German streets, there has been an escalating chorus of complaints from government regulators and media. Politicians demanded that the faces of people photographed on those streets and even the images of license plates and building numbers—all captured in public—be obscured, which Google did. In Hamburg, Google agreed to notify neighborhoods before the Street View car came to town (better hide

Oma und die Kinder

! Google’s in town!). Germany’s federal minister of food, agriculture, and consumer protection, Ilse Aigner, told the German newsmagazine Focus in 2010 that Street View was “a comprehensive photo oﬀensive” that “is noth- ing less than a million-fold violation of the private sphere.”

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