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by shadowgovt 45 days ago
The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.

To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
2 comments
pocksuppet 45 days ago
Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!
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47282847 45 days ago
Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.
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traderj0e 45 days ago
The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech
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shadowgovt 45 days ago
Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.

The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.

Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.

Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.

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traderj0e 45 days ago
Germany had restricted speech before WWI or WWII too, and they're mistaken if they think it's going to protect them from fascism this time.
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