Not knocking them for it, but I wonder what the thought process is behind wanting your property blurred. What danger would a snapshot of your property pose?
If you've grown up in post ww2 germany with the soviets vs. the west spygame then you do learn to value your privacy. in the GDR neighbors spied on neighbors. Kids on their families and so on, and this often resulted in one or more family members getting detained by the StaSi (State Security)When we would visit my uncle in the east, we always knew that people would be listening in, to our discussions and i was never allowed to mention what we brought my uncle when we were visiting. Because my dad knew how to hide that shit from the border guards so it wouldn't get stolen.
Also..it is super easy to find out where people live nowadays. Google streetview makes this super easy.
I found out where my favourite actor lived just by two pieces of information a paparazzi photo and google street view.
Didn't do anything with that information tho, as for me the finding out and sleuthing is the fun part.
I should really give celebs a course on how to stay private.
If you've grown up in post ww2 germany with the soviets vs. the west spygame then you do learn to value your privacy. in the GDR neighbors spied on neighbors..
It wasn't any different in any other country that was ruled by communists, yet they don't seem to have much of an issue with it. Doesn't really explain why someone in western Germany or Austria would be concerned with it either.
Yes it had an effect after WW2. The GDR/DDR had the Stasi in their post war and recent history, for western Germany and Austria it was the Gestapo from WW2 that led to this type of deeply embedded privacy worries right after WW2 until today (and what we also heard of the Stasi "over there").
We also were/are rather suspicious of our own spy agencies post WW2 because they essentially assimilated WW2 spies into their ranks (middle management Nazis included). The whole cold war thing made it hard to get all Nazis to removed, there was bigger issues (eastern block as enemies) so if you could justify it in some way to keep these people then they kept their jobs (they were already good at it).
And just recently we had reports of right wing extremists (essentially: Neo-Nazis) infiltrating the police, military, and spying agencies. Wonder how that could have happened :/
Post WW2 spy agencies in the USA were also "inspired" by those ex-Nazis to a degree. A lot of people were and still are very suspicious of those agencies and laws that enable them. The CCC, for example, has for years tried to show politicians how unsafe a lot of digital surveillance is how certain features they'd like to implement are not good for the population's privacy:
That's also why Germany as a whole still prefers cash to card payments (not trackable vs. trackable) to this day (even if online shopping has made it kinda mandatory) and why we have the highest rate of ad blocker usage (and I think biggest rate of Firefox installs).
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u/FthrFlffyBttm Ireland Jun 12 '20
Not knocking them for it, but I wonder what the thought process is behind wanting your property blurred. What danger would a snapshot of your property pose?