[flohofwoe]

Privacy was a major concern in former socialist countries like East Germany were the Stasi and hundreds-of-thousands of "Unofficial Collaborators" spied on millions of citizens. People were very alert in their everyday lives about who they could talk to about what topics (because talking about the wrong things to the wrong people could easily cost you your carreer or land you in jail).

I would hardly call life in the GDR 'privileged'.

It's easy to forget today and from a Western point of view that privacy is a basic human right, not a feature of your smartphone to protect from tracking ads.

[notahacker]

Sure, but it was the dictatorship locking people up for wrongthink that was the problem, not the lack of privacy.

I don't think many East Germans would take the GDR back in return for guarantees that views would stay private so long as they were expressed in private...

[flohofwoe]

The dictatorship was enabled by violation of people's privacy, that's why it managed to survived so long.

Privacy isn't an optional feature you can "chose" to have or even have much control over, it is a basic right that is either violated or honored by those in power.

[notahacker]

What enabled the dictatorship was punishing people for perceived disloyalty and shooting people who tried to leave. Privacy was, at best, a weak defence against that, and arguably much of the Stasi's raison d'etre was to convince citizens their concerns about the government ought to stay private.

Better a Germany where people feel safe to share far more on social media than the Stasi could ever have collected, because they don't expect to suffer consequences from doing so.