Regarding the first issue, I have to admit that it seems I underestimated the mistrust in elected representatives compared to the mistrust in private companies, which are often not to be held accountable in any way as long as no privacy legislation gives you a right to hold them accountable. In Germany we mistrust the government a lot, but at least they are the elected untrustworthy. Since there is little reason to trust in binding corporate rules or other self-regulatory approaches for a whole and non-definable branch such as ‘all data processing and storing companies’ I don’t see the possibility of something like a third way besides privacy legislation and international cooperation on both the standards but in particular on the enforcement issue too.
The second issue is that I would really like to see the format of the Economist debate on German language newspaper or magazine websites as well. The only thing I am not that happy with yet is the voting system. The Economists question ‘agree with the motion’ is an invitation for campaigning (I’ve seen ‘click-no-campaigning’ on Twitter, and it was interesting to see that most of the written comments were mostly pro while the vote was very narrow in the end). The number of how many changed their minds on the issue during the debate is only visible as a mouseover – this could be enhanced, since convincing someone of a different opinion seems to be much more interesting than how many readers agree with the one or the other side of the fence in a non-representative way. Maybe there could be a change to the voting model that only on the first one or two days the voting is open and after that you are only allowed to change your opinion. This could help avoiding campaigning effects a little at least, I guess.
Have you ever heard a talk of Jeff Jarvis? He’s a brilliant speaker, invited to many conferences due to that. He’s able to provoke the audience, to convince and to influence - by stating the obvious. But I never heard anything either new or even seriously complex from Mr. Jarvis. He has been talking a lot on Media issues, and most of it was easy to strip down to ‘change has come but the media is not prepared’. He focuses on stating the obvious, predicting the present and giving the wonderful advice ‘think yourself’. Have you ever read his popular ‘What would google do?’ He recommends to focus on your customers needs. Oh, well. That’s already written in one of the oldest book my family owns from the 1840s, a how-to-guide for merchants. But who focuses on the customer? Google? Well…
Jeff Jarvis moved on to the ‘paradoxon’ of the german privacy discussion. Well, Jeffs German is not that bad, so he can read a lot in my mother tongue and probably has some idea about the german mindset. He has seen naked people on the beach and in the spa, maybe even in public parks sometimes (most people don’t do so-called FKK anyway, but thats a different story). But what he does not understand at all is that the constitutional right to informational self-determination is not only privacy, but also publicness. It’s your choice, as long as it does not affect others. The modern discussion of this particular right started with this opinion from 1972, provided by law scientists on request of the Ministry of Interior. Since then, the discussion has faced many twists and for a long time the question of the states role in the privacy and security relationship prevailed over the question of personally identifiable information held by private companies. It is one of the most difficult questions how to maintain the right balance between participating in the public and at the same time not being discriminated by hidden aggregation of data which leads to an asynchronous level of information about who knows how much about you, which is seen to be ultimately a scenario where citizens are jailed in information collected and processed by others without proper counter measures.
But time changes and now we face a highly problematic asnychronous scenario: companies from countries may collect and process your data without proper safeguards and without your knowledge. Of course you may say, everybody knows that Google or Facebook are residing in the US. But many people just don’t know they are not protected as much as they were if it was a German company. Being a consumer should not turn out to be a full time job and not to study international law. From a consumer perspective, there is a simple understanding: if you want my money, my data, my knowledge - whatever: my law is applicable and enforcable. As soon as a company aims at the consumers market, it has to obey to these rules, whether they like it or not. If you decide not to do so, it’s fine. If you decide you want to have the laws changed, that’s fine, too. But first you got to change the law. Everything else is not only disrespectful behavior, it’s also a threat to consumers.
Being a brilliant speaker is not enough for a discussion such as this. You got do dig into the analysis of what’s going on, what’s the state you are coming from and what’s actually the goal you have - and what are the values you build your theory on.
I heard a lot of complaints of citizens who simply do not understand what Google does and what it means and why a company might be allowed to take pictures in the public. They feel insecure, badly protected and at the mercy of a company they have no tools to enforce their rights against them. You have to treat their concerns in a serious way. Not by making fun of them if some of them might be unreasonable. Not by putting the pressure on them as some people want to do. Help them understand and help them enforce their rights. ‘What would Google do?’, as shallow as it is, should be rewritten by Jeff Jarvis by using the example of lack of understanding of what’s going on in Germany regarding privacy concerns. The new chapter should be named: ‘Fail like Google does’. Yes, the German Paradoxon is a paradoxon. But paradoxon has two meanings: either something is contradictory or it just appears (para) to be. The German Paradoxon in my opinion is the second, not the first.
Last week, Google announced that it will launch StreetView for Germany this year. At the same time, they said to publish a new tool for objections against having your house or flat or the one you are living in right now (yes, many houses and flats are just rented in Germany) shown there.
An interesting debate. And it’s very exhaustive at the same time for me, personally. There is no easy yes or no to a service such as Street View. The company made so many mistakes with the whole concept in a German view, that it can not just ignore it. Now it’s a heated political debate and I think I’m not exaggerating when thinking that if companies like G don’t become more professional they are running into serious trouble soon. The moment for the announcement, during summer holiday season, with many unclear half-statements and the german speaker staff unable or maybe just not allowed to answer many questions raised, unable to react even to the most obvious bullshit statements (including such as tv stars talking about street view as a live video service. no, it’s not tv to be blamed here.) the company failed miserably on making this debate a debate on data protection, publicness and other main questions. Looks as if there is not mainly a kind of gap between privacy culture but mainly a difference in those available and those in command.
Now the debate in Germany started to turn away a bit from Street View itself and more to the general approach and views on data protection, privacy and publicness in the digital world. Without big G, for now. It’s disturbing, if a CEO of a huge IT companyis talking quark (curd cheese) such as ‘young adults should change their name when turning 18′, if a company known for it’s software is failing to test their tools compatibility with IE8, if they lack the transparency they claim to promote elsewhere. They still rely on their old model of ‘if I run my service in the US, I’m out of trouble’. No, you are going to run into serious trouble in the long run instead. And maybe it’s better you learn quickly that being huge and potentially influential does not equal to being grown up.
Is the internet really a tool for promoting democracy in authoritarian states? Is it just a relay of the existing societies mechanisms? Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org asked me whether I’d like to participate in an interview with Evgeny Morozov for his podcast series. Evgeny, a Belarus born researcher at Georgetown University and contributing editor at Foreign Policy gave us a lot of insights in his very interesting research. Thanks a lot for both, the interview and the opportunity to do it.
The interview is available as MP3 (62 MB) and OGG Vorbis (46 MB).
Dear readers/subscribers. Some of you might miss updates, most of you won’t even have noticed yet. I never ran this blog on a regular basis, my time schedule never allowed me to do.
With the beginning of february, I joined the german consumer protection federal organisation (verbraucherzentrale bundesverband), where I work as a policy officer on consumer rights in the digital world. A nice project with very nice people and, what I like the most, a still fast developing environment. I joined due to my very personal wish of working more in-depth on several topics I dealt with over the past years (I don’t have to be that angry about print media management not understanding even the basics of the net after 10 yrs anymore).
Thanks for your patience and your appreciation. A new and just started project sometimes needs more hands-on hours than you might expect before. In the end it hopefully will be successful and bring the best for all of you.
Joe Trippi, one of the most highly reputated online campaigners on earth, asks whether it’s time to establish an equivalent of my.barackobama.com after he succeeded in the US presidential election: a platform my.whitehouse.gov to get people involved into the needs and deeds of the next president of the United States.
I think this is a very nice idea, but I’d recommend to go one step further: my.whitehouse.gov for US citizens, and your.whitehouse.gov for all those who are affected or interested in the US presidents policy making but not being citizens of the United States of America. Never forget: the president of the USA is not only important to US citizens. He also plays a political role on world level.
The world is looking on the United States today: the results of todays US presidential election will surely lead to one thing - a new president of one of the most important, maybe politically still the most important country on earth.
So it’s time to think about the man who’s going to leave the White House now. What do the eight years of George Walker Bush being in charge leave behind for the rest of the world?
First of all, the end of the Bush administration with all it’s failed foreign policies is a broadly welcomed day. Being the winning loser of the first election in 2000 against Al Gore, Bush with his legendary hands-on-anti-intellectualism showed the world what happens, if you give someone a knife without telling him that it’s a dual use good. You can slice bread with it or you can slice people. Regarding the use of knives, there was not much bread in Bushs two terms. Instead of making the world a more safe, more human rights respecting, less problematic and a more free place, he managed to weaken security, causing and awaking strong anti-americanism not only in the countries he attacked. Bush did more for dictatorships around the globe than most dictators do. Maybe he did even have the right opinion (democracy is good, dictatorship is bad, the poor and starving deserve a better life and so on), but his deeds are what he has to be measured on.
Second, no one will miss Bush. The firebrand rhetorics of non-intellectual missionary quality, combined with the inability to interact seriously on international level - which would have meant i. e. to accept negotiations on eye level even though the partners might appear weaker in some way.
Third but nonetheless important, Bush failed on one of the most crucial (no, not crusadial) issues: finding new approaches to promote democracy and equality in the critical regions of Africa and Asia. Bushs doctrine based on the main power the US without doubts can rely on: geostrategic military power. There’s no place on earth a US president could not reach with military power. But there is more in the toolbox of politics than just brute force. We got to hope his successor will try out some more and maybe even international instruments. Even though it’s clear that the more the US play on international levels the involvement of countries will be enforced which sat in their couches until now. But in fact, it would have been stupid to accompany the misleading adventures of Bush.
Expectations are high - on both, the electorate and the upcoming president - and low, compared to Bushs political performance. Bushs burdens are heavy weighted, but it’s not impossible to smooth his failures out. You just gotta belive. And by the way: thank you for nothing, Mr. Bush.
Today, I attended the speech of Barack Obama at Street of the 17th of June/Siegessäule. As I did, another estimated 200.000 people came to hear Obama speak. On my way back, on an escalator at central station, I was asked by two nice elderly US citizens why I’ve been there since they could simply not understand what’s on a u.s. presidential candidate so interesting to so many people here.
My answer was just half of the truth, I have to admit. I said that I studied political science and one of my main subjects was political communication. I was interested in the setting, the scenery and the speech of a presidential candidate abroad. But thinking about it later, I have to add some more remarks (even though this post is going to have some lengths). Continue Reading »
Our key findings were: German politicians and parties are yet unable to adapt online campaigning techniques such as established in the US or France for example. Some hope seems to lie in YouTube activities, but neither none of the parties nor the leading politicians has a MySpace profile. Some party groups do exist on StudiVZ, the leading german facebook copycat, and on Facebook itself.
If you are interested, I could translate some more of the findings. Leave a comment and I will try.
In Europe, the presidential campaign is widely noticed. Since most of the population shook it’s head over the Bush ./. Gore fiasco in 2000, was pretty upset and astonished by the re-election of “Cowboy George” (god damn, he lied on iraq, promotes only the interest of the wealthy oil and ammo companies - that’s the way he’s seen in Europe), it became expecting very much from Barack Obama.
He’s smart, he’s black, he’s the most left candidate in the american political spectrum. Europeans were amazed, even though the emptiness of the “Change” rhetorics was critisized as some kind of wildcard-politics.
Now Obama filled some of the empty spaces in his political program. And Europeans are irritated and disgusted by it. There’s no country in Europe having gun laws like the US and there’s no country in Europe having violent crime rates as the US has (within the EU at least). Obama aims at the White House, seems to flip flop towards the so-called election deciding center, the volatile voters. It’s a clear political chess move: John McCain is not able to counter it by aiming at those who favor stricter gun control laws. But it seems to be strange to all those who expected Obama to be a liberal in the european meaning.
Politics all over the world will be widely affected by the outcome of the presidential election. But just a very small group of estimated 50% of the americans have a vote on this issue. The President of the United States of America is the leader of the worlds largest, structural and cultural well-established democracy. But due to that, he’s ruling not only between Hawaii and New Haven.
It’s time to have a direct vote on the general secretary of the UN. Then, the US citizens would be able to have their president again without so much interest from all over the world. And the europeans would not be surprised anymore by finding out that US politicians turn out to be US politicians.
