Das Deutsche Paradoxon

Author: Jeff Jarvis for DLD debate

Anxiety about privacy, it turns out, often rises out of new technology and the change it brings. The first discussion of a legal right to privacy in the U.S. did not come until 1890, brought about by the invention of the portable Kodak camera, the growth of the penny press, and the fear that one’s image could suddenly be seen by many. (Our cultural addiction to fame, it seems, developed later.) The advent of the telephone, the microphone, video cameras, and computers caused similar trepidation. Even Gutenberg’s press worried the earliest authors, who were concerned about tying their names to their opinions, permanently and broadly.

Our latest technology, the internet, is causing change every bit as profound as that wrought by Gutenberg. It is also dredging up fresh fears about privacy—especially in Germany. I wonder why that is. I also wonder what it says about Germany, technology, and change—and about other cultures, by comparison. But I prefer to frame the question not in terms of privacy—protecting against what could go wrong—but instead in terms of publicness and the benefits it brings. For I fear that in our current mania about privacy, we risk losing sight of the opportunities brought by the connections and collaboration the net now enables.    

Google Street View is the symbol of Germany’s relationship between technology and privacy. It has caused a furor (at least among government and media) since Google’s cars began taking pictures of the outside of buildings—that is, public places photographed from public streets. German politicians demanded that the faces of people photographed on those streets and images of license plates and building numbers be obscured, which Google has done. Google agreed in Hamburg to notify neighborhoods before the Street View car came to town (while in America, people stand on the street and perform in hopes of being caught by its lenses). Politicians in the city of Leverkusen proposed charging Google 150€ for every kilometer Street View pictured—never mind that local governments sell aerial images of their streets and T-Mobile’s TelefonBuch.de serves up overhead images of homes and their backyards from four perspectives, tied to addresses and thus names and phone numbers. One wonders whether the real issue in the fight over Street View is privacy or Google or profit or America.

Germany’s consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, told Focus that Street View was “a comprehensive photo offensive” that “is nothing less than a million-fold violation of the private sphere.” She wanted Google to obtain the consent of every citizen before publishing photos of the outside of their homes. She also provided an online form enabling citizens to demand that their photos of their homes be removed and so Google began obscuring—pixelating—them. Verpixelungsrecht is the new word that describes the right of buildings—buildings!—to be pixilated in Street View’s maps and so far, 250,000 Germans and their buildings have claimed the right. The apparent absurdity is not lost on everyone. German media man Jens Best responded to the controversy by starting a site where people can take pictures of the pixilated buildings and link them to their locations on Street View. It could get even more absurd: A technologist in the U.S. has proposed a means of automatically erasing only people from Street View images—leaving a ghostly, neutron-bomb landscape where the people disappear but the buildings remain (the software is not yet perfected and so even after its erasure is done, one can still see the occasional dog and leash with no owner). At a forum held by the Greens in Berlin—where I spoke—a member of the audience asked only half-jokingly whether historians in the future would blame this era for leaving German cities in digital ruins as Allied bombs did in World War II.

Of course, Google’s case—and that of its defenders, like me—was not helped when the company was found to have been not only taking pictures but also capturing random data from wi-fi networks as its Street View cars passed. Other companies capture wi-fi addresses in this manner but Google says a rogue employee enabled the cars to also capture traffic on those networks. The data, quite random, is useless, but the damage in the debate was real, only raising more fear and continued hostility. In 2010, the Google Street View car was vandalized in Germany. In Austria, a 70-year-old man threatened the car with a garden pick. A comedy show on the German network ZDF created a spoof video about a new service: “Google Home View.” A Google Man in a Google hat with a camera in hand tells unsuspecting Germans at their front doors that that Google is going to take pictures inside their homes—and some acquiesce. “You’re doing this all over Germany?” asks the resident. Says Google Man: “Every house all over Germany, every room, everything is going to be photographed, and everything is going to be on the Internet.” Sounds believable enough. Because of data protection laws requiring the obscuring of faces, Google Man gives one home’s residents black bars to hold in front of their eyes—“pixel boards,” he calls them. At another house, a woman objects, turning the tables on Google Man and taking a picture of his car. Google Man protests, holds the pixel board in front of his eyes, and threatens: “Well, if you’re not going to play along, we’ll discontinue your Google.” Judging from the uproarious laughter in the studio, the audience got the joke even if the subjects didn’t.

            If only the privacy fight over Google were always so apparent in its irony. In 2007, Germany’s government debated a law that would have required Google to retain the verified names and addresses of Google users tied to their data to aid in criminal investigations. Google, appalled, threatened to shut down its mail service entirely rather than enable government to spy on citizens in a country that had all too much experience with the practice. Of course, a common explanation of Germans’ passionate advocacy of privacy is that the secret police of the Nazis and the East German Stasi surveilled citizens in their private lives and that is why Germans fear any possible intrusion. But in this case, I’ll argue that Google was the better protector of privacy than the modern German government.

 

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DLD debate: Are the impacts of the digital revolution predominantly good or bad? What are the consequences for society, industry, individuals and culture? The DLD debate tackles these questions and brings together a selected group of thought leaders, experts, and creative visionaries to share their views. The essays are multipublished together with our media partners Focus Online and The European.

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            I have argued with Germans that they should also be mindful of their history when they try to censor Street View, for in limiting Google’s ability to photograph public streets and others’ ability to take pictures of people there, they set a dangerous precedent: If anyone can tell Google not to take a picture of a public place, then what is to stop some powerful miscreant caught in a bad act from making the same demand of a journalist or a citizen? Will Bild’s Reader Reporters, for example, be forbidden from taking pictures of events, buildings, and people that could be newsworthy and could be printed in the paper? Are we back at the point where we fear Kodak cameras and the press?

Ah, my German debaters have said, but there’s a difference between a public person and private person, a public act and a private act committed with an expectation of privacy. That, I’ve responded, is a dangerous distinction if you allow it to be made case-by-case. For what if I walked out on the street and littered and you wanted to take a picture of me to illustrate the awful American despoiling your fair city? What if I claimed an expectation of privacy? Would you agree? What if, instead, it’s the mayor sneaking into an opium den you catch on camera? Or a police officer beating an innocent citizen? Or a parent harming a child? Would you agree now that they may have an expectation of privacy in public (which, indeed, is what may embolden them to misbehave)? I would think that a nation freed of its tyrants twice in the prior century would see the danger: Limiting what’s public may grant the despot a curtain to hide behind. What’s public is public. What’s public is owned by the public. It is a public good. When anyone diminishes what is public, that is like stealing from the public.

            I don’t think Germany’s privacy fixation begins in the 1930s. I think that it stretches back much earlier, that it is integral to the German cultural DNA. I know from my German grandfather-in-law—who sailed from Emden in 1923—that privacy is ingrained in the culture. “You mustn’t tell people that,” our Opa would scold us. “No one needs to know that.” When I spoke at the Re:publica conference in Berlin in 2010, I asked the crowd whether he sounded like their Opas. He did. Privacy is a core attribute of the German character. It is neither a stereotype nor a cliché to observe that Germans are intensely, almost universally private.

But now we arrive at the German paradox: On a trip to DLD in 2009, I visited the sauna in my hotel. There I learned first-hand that in Germany, saunas are co-ed and naked—“mixed,” as they say. Germans love their saunas—and now, so do I. I subsequently visited neighborhood spas in Berlin and Therme Erding, a large, waterpark-like attraction in Munich’s suburbs with more than a dozen choices of saunas. All are naked, all are co-ed (except for the occasional women’s day). They schwitz and shower and lounge around together in the nude, all very casual, quite normal. It’s not at all sexual. Nakedness is a matter of robust health, in the wise German view. Germans enshrine this belief under the initials FKK, which stand for Freikörperkultur (free body culture). Germans swim naked at the beach. They sometimes sunbathe openly in city parks. They have no problem taking off their clothes.

All of which made me realize that the Germans care deeply about the privacy of everything … except their private parts.

            OK, that’s a punch line, a silly joke that took a long time coming. And I recognize, of course, that sitting in a sauna and standing on a public stage are different. But behind that simple, ironic observation lies a lesson and a question for us all: Why is the private private? What makes our bodies strictly private in America but casually public in Germany? I think the Germans have a much more mature, sensible, and healthy attitude about their bodies than we more Puritanical Americans do. And then what makes the public public? There, the Americans are more liberal.

As we debate the private vs. the public, we would do well to reexamine our cultural conventions to see what they say about us and our assumptions regarding privacy and society. In Norway and Finland, citizens’ taxes and income are published openly. In the U.S., personal finances are probably the second most guarded secret people have after their health data. And in secretive Switzerland, two politicians enraged their opponents when they dared reveal their own income and taxes. In the Netherlands, convention has it that one should leave one’s curtains open, no matter what happens behind them. But a Norwegian told me that in nearby Belgium, a neighbor called the police on a foreigner walking around her own home in underwear with the curtains parted. (I should note that when I tried to find an illustration of the Dutch open-curtain policy using Google Street View, I could not find a single unobscured window. Perhaps the neighbors had been warned the car was there that day.) In the U.S., we reveal the identities of people arrested for crimes but in Germany, accused criminals’ eyes are covered when published in the press, obscured with those pixel boards the Google man used.

I have surprised people in the U.S. blogging frankly about my prostate cancer and the impotence and temporary incontinence it brought (why is it more acceptable to talk about operations to take out hemorrhoids or fat?). I received tremendous benefit in return: support, useful information, and the gratification of knowing that other men got tested for the disease. This is what I mean when I talk about the benefits of publicness. They include collaboration, collective knowledge, new and improved relationships, trust, and more.

            When I gave a talk on privacy and publicness at Re:publica, the response amazed me. Coverage landed on the front pages of three major newspapers; other newspapers not only covered my remarks but felt compelled to rebut me and start debates about my views. What was said there was also reported in the country’s two newsmagazines and on TV and radio. I hit a hot button, for sure.

I believe the nerve I really touched is a nagging fear Germans harbor that their culture is coming into fundamental conflict with internet culture. When I spoke about this idea with a group of editors from Die Zeit, one of them said that his own children did not operate under his rules—Germans’ rules—but under the internet’s. They were more public. We need to ask, then, whether internet culture will come to supersede local culture for every land. Perhaps what we think of as youth culture—sharing updates on Facebook and photos on Flickr, creating media, broadcasting our locations—is really a preview of the society developing around all of us. Will it start to take on the force of a global culture?

The internet’s enthusiasm for openness and publicness still has not fully conquered Germany, though. One illustration: blogging—and the open sharing of lives and opinions it enables—has never taken off there the way it has in many other countries. I asked the 2,000 people at the Re:publica blogging conference whether I was standing before all the nation’s bloggers. “Half,” one of them shouted to laughter. In America, there are millions. I’ve often questioned Germans about why blogging has not flourished there. Some of my friends say Germans don’t like to share their lives and opinions. They explain that Germans don’t even tell each other whom they vote for. But then again, I see Germans sit in front of cameras sharing opinions aplenty on endless prime-time TV shows. So I don’t buy that explanation.

        When I wrote about this German paradox on my blog, a commenter, Tilmann Hanitzsch, supplied a provocative explanation for why his fellow Germans are less likely to open up: “We lack a culture of sharing our knowledge,” he said. “We have an anti-social attitude to consider each and every bit of our knowledge as a competitive advantage best kept to ourselves. And we mistrust the fools giving it away for free…. The push-button conditioning I grew up with: Have a problem? Don’t expose it—somebody will use it against you! Had a success? Keep quiet—it will cause envy!... Made a mistake? How embarrassing. Talk about it? Good lord, no! Consequently, we’re not only entitled to our own mistakes,” he says, but will repeat the mistakes of others. When I played that notion back in Berlin, many Germans I spoke with supported Hanitzsch’s thesis.

They tell me that Germans have a problem making mistakes and then being open about it. These Germans I spoke with—all internet people—are envious of American entrepreneurs who often brag about their mistakes, seeing failure as a badge of lessons learned. My German friends acknowledge that in their fear of failure, they are left at a strategic weakness in the public, digital economy that is replacing the closed, industrial economy Germany knows so well because it helped build it—starting with the industry of printing.

The notion of the beta—of trying something before it is perfected, of making mistakes in public so as to learn and collaborate—is so antithetical to the soul of government regulators in Germany and Europe that privacy czars of seven European nations plus Canada, Israel, and New Zealand sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt in April 2010 that not only complained about Street View and privacy missteps with Google’s Gmail and Buzz, but also advised the company against putting out products as betas, before they could be perfected. These politicians and government bureaucrats, conditioned to avoid public failure at all costs, apparently could not imagine Google’s motives in willingly making mistakes in public. There we see the culture-clash over publicness come to life in a way that can affect government and regulation, industries and innovation.

            Publicness, you see, is about much more than sharing what you had for breakfast on Twitter, your opinions in a blog, your private parts in the sauna, or your housefront on Street View. It is about the essential attitude of a society toward risk, progress, change, openness, transparency, collaboration, success, and failure.

 This essay is adapted from Jeff Jarvis’ upcoming book, Public Parts (Das Deutsche Paradoxon). Jarvis is author of What Would Google Do? (Was Würde Google Tun?) and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He writes on new media for the Guardian and blogs at Buzzmachine.com.

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