[pintxo]

It's likely an effect of data privacy being established as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the German constitution and further strengthened by specific laws like the German data privacy law, which is a lot older than GDPR.

Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].

Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...