[unknownaccount]

Germany has many anti-privacy laws like the Impressum system which forces website owners to essentially dox themselves on a public webpage. I’m not sure where the misconception that Germany had strong privacy laws came from.

[hammyhavoc]

I've long believed this, but surprisingly, very few Germans I've spoken to feel this way about it, admittedly my sample is Berlin-centric, so perhaps that isn't a very good litmus test for general German sentiment considering the demographics of Berlin consist of a lot of non-Germans who likely aren't that clued-up, and that perhaps skews sentiment as a whole.

[GekkePrutser]

Big cities are always a lot more progressive.

But a christian-conservative like Merkel wouldn't have come to power if it wasn't for the more rural masses. They must have enough votes to influence policy in such a big way. And those are the ones that are the most susceptible to 'for the children!!!' type privacy invasion. At least in my experience here in the Netherlands, this is usually the angle those measures are pushed from.

I've also been surprised at how bad Germany is for privacy. For example when I tried to sign up at Hetzner they demanded that I sent a photocopy of my ID. When I did so after arguing, I blacked out my social security number which is very susceptible to ID fraud and even the local police provide instructions to block it out on scans.

However they refused that. So I refused them. I didn't try other German providers but went to France instead (Scaleway) and had a much better experience without ID crap.

[AnonCoward42]

Merkel is not christian-conservative except for the label of the party itself. She hit most of the progressive boxes really, especially "no nations, no borders" and the climate sale of indulgence.

I also wanna add that Merkel was elected by big city voters as well and not just the (framed stupid and wrong) "rural masses".

> They must have enough votes to influence policy in such a big way. And those are the ones that are the most susceptible to 'for the children!!!' type privacy invasion.

Realistically speaking once a party is in charge the people have no saying in the politics and the only thing that matters is how it is framed in the media. If the media says that people like it, it's okay, otherwise they might rethink it, but even that is not a guarantee. Given that most media outlets are dependent on government money they are mostly mouthpieces of the same.

[vidarh]

This sounds like you're coming from a very US viewpoint. By European standards she is firmly conservative.

[AnonCoward42]

I am German and her politics and talking points were progressive politics/talking points.

[_abox]

Admittedly I'm a bit disguntled by the conservatives in my own country which are mainly supported by the rural communities. I let that show too much in my comment which was not fair. I'm sorry.

[zx85wes]

Don't be. I'm sure most people here feel the same.

[hammyhavoc]

That's very interesting re Hetzner. When I signed up Hetzner about two weeks ago, I wasn't asked for any kind of ID, in fact I was quite surprised how little friction there was. Experience hasn't been good though, so you haven't missed out on much. Downtime and connectivity issues have meant hours of time wasted on an issue that wasn't even at our end. Will check out Scaleway!

[GekkePrutser]

Strange. This was at least 5 years ago so perhaps it changed.

I'm very happy with scaleway. They're a bit smaller and really easy to deal with IMO, you can ask them questions directly on slack and they don't look down on the small customer. I have 2 VPSes of the cheapest kind "Stardust" (1,80€ per month) and they're quick and friendly.

They used to have 8-core atom servers that were a bit unstable, mainly due to the nbd network based root filesystem. One network hiccup and it would go read only. They were really cheap though (12€ per month for dedicated metal is pretty amazing) but I did need support for that a couple of times.

But since I moved over to their VPS offering I've had no issues and I heard that they deprecated all the nbd based platforms due to these issues.

[vidarh]

That's odd, I have never experienced downtime and connectivity issues there, with constant use for over ten years.

[raverbashing]

Personal privacy is different than commercial privacy I guess

[zyx321]

Bingo. Impressum is mandatory for commercial sites (including anything ad-supported), but on the other hand WHOIS has been crippled by German privacy laws. The standard API will give you only the name servers, and the denic website will give you the owner-c email address (after solving a captcha) but no mailing address without a court order.