Here is a nice little anecdote. I previously mentioned that the official German Federal Bureau of Information Technology (BSI) launched a tool [2] to help the public find out if their identities were included in the analysis of a recently cracked botnet that resulted in a database of 16 million people's identities [1].
Germans can enter their email address and you are given a result as to whether you were included or not. If you are, you are advised to assume that you computer is compromised.
I told my office colleagues about this (who are German and not tin-foil hat wearers by any means), who immediately stated that they wouldn't use it because they don't trust the government not to spy on them. They specifically referenced the backdoor / trojan that was attributed to the BND back in 2011 as a case in point [3].
Personally, I think that this little story quite accurately sums up German attitudes to privacy and distrust of government.
I would like to add that the German distrust of government is fundamentally different to what I've come to know about the American distrust of government. We are very careful to give the government power that might be used to control the populace and further a totalitarian regime. But otherwise we have a strong government with a robust public health care system, free education (including great public universities) and reasonably good unemployment insurance. Some of that is eroding away unfortunately, but by an large Germans have a much more positive attitude regarding government organization and regulation than Americans.
I think the focus here is on the public part. Private universities in Germany don't have a particularly good reputation in general and are considered to be a way out for children who didn't do well in school but have parents rich enough to buy them into a university.
Public schools on the other hand are all considered to be more or less equally good, so it doesn't really matter which one you attended later in life, which as I gather is different in the US.
Germans can enter their email address and you are given a result as to whether you were included or not. If you are, you are advised to assume that you computer is compromised.
I told my office colleagues about this (who are German and not tin-foil hat wearers by any means), who immediately stated that they wouldn't use it because they don't trust the government not to spy on them. They specifically referenced the backdoor / trojan that was attributed to the BND back in 2011 as a case in point [3].
Personally, I think that this little story quite accurately sums up German attitudes to privacy and distrust of government.
[1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Presse2... [2] https://www.sicherheitstest.bsi.de/ [3] http://theconversation.com/ein-spy-is-the-german-government-...