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by jamesblonde
3672 days ago
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Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy.
Here in Sweden, everything is digitalized and it makes life easy. I think of this externality of managing your taxes and stuff like that as "societal tax". Time is money, and countries like Germany and the US have ridiculously high levels of "societal tax" - you have to think so much to make simple decisions. Can i fix this problem with the govt in an afternoon, should I save this receipt for my tax declaration, to things like do I trust the taxi will turn up on time, will the train arrive on time? |
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Ah, and by the way, what people don't seem to understand is that it's also thanks to laws about privacy that Germany (and Europe in General) is funding more and more companies. People don't use Google Analytics due to that most of the time. Microsoft had to open a data center in Frankfurt, and so on, and so on. All this has diverse implications: hiring a company that keeps data in Germany. Who does it? German companies (or European companies). And money flows as it should. The country grows, people learn software, new jobs are created, and so on.
I would be not so hasty about changing privacy laws - they are there for a (good) reason (actually, more than one). Maybe in the next 10-15 years, when European (and German) software companies are more stable, then yes why not? But now, I am not so sure about it.