this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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That's because Europe has actual experience with having their privacy invaded and it wasn't just to show you relevant ads. During the war my grandparents burned letters and books after reading them. And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal... but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.
The UN formally declared privacy as a human right a few years after the war ended. Specifically in response to what happened during the war.
A lot of the data used by police to commit horrific crimes was collected before the war, for example they'd go into a cemetery home and find a list of people who attended a funeral six years ago, then arrest everyone who was there. You can't wait for a government to start doing things like that - you have to stop the data from being collected in the first place.
Imagine how much worse it could be today, with so much more data collected and automated tools to analyse the data. Imagine if you lived in Russian occupied Ukraine right now - what data can Russia find about you? Do you have a brother serving in Ukraine's army? Maybe your brother would defect if you were taken hostage...
Well, it defers a lot from country to country.
For example, populations in the Scandinavian countries have high trust in their governments and let them collect a lot of private data. They have personal identification numbers that contain lots of personal information that many institutions (e.g. banks) have access to unless you ask for privacy protection. All of this also makes interaction with institutions very streamlined and easy, but it comes at the cost of less privacy.
In Norway and Sweden, for example, anyone can access personal income data about anyone living in the country. Full transparency, more or less.
On the other hand, a country like Germany does not issue personal identification numbers because the population is highly skeptical of data collection and registration, a remnant from the wars. Germany is much more bureaucratic and its government less efficient, but Germans prefer the arm's length approach to government data collection and almost no data is publicly accessible.
And that's very stupid.
But psychologically this may be a good thing - people learn to not be ashamed of saying "yeah, you can get all this information about me, but it's simply not your concern, so fsck off" from the very beginning.
It may feel stupid to you, but Scandinavia is a very different world than, for example, the US. They've never had a reason to not trust their governments. They are among the happiest countries in the world and their economies are outstanding and have been for a long time, and the standard of living is second to none. They feel like their governments work for them.
Same can be said of Germany, but they've obviously gone through different historic events and their approach to government is different.
From how people actually from those countries (and not approving Americans) seem to me, the main reason their governments function well is exactly that they don't have too much power or bureaucratic depth to brew something bad, and because people don't trust them or respect them too much.
I'd say that's the reason these are "among the happiest countries in the world".
That they don't "trust" the government (the way approving Americans would want to), they just don't fear it or treat it as magic. And I think most people elsewhere willing to live "like in Scandinavia" would push things into the opposite direction, if given their way.
I've lived in several Scandinavian countries for many years. You're wrong.
Oh. Well, then we'll see that trust erode, because that's what happens to trust always. Nature has feedbacks to compensate for disturbances. And Scandinavian countries' good government is a relatively new thing historically.