Opinion Has data protection been abolished?

Quick translation by yours truly. Original source [A]

Has data protection been abolished?​

I'm increasingly getting a certain impression.

Am I the only one?

For some time I've been thinking that data protection has been de facto completely abolished in Germany and Austria.

Not officially, of course, but through the back door. The state-level data protection officers often do nothing about it, many just give dumb replies.

Although I've got the additional impression that it's not the data protection officers themselves, but they snuck in employees who

• are politically in line and loyal to the party,
• decide and act purely for political reasons,
• have no, or only a superficial idea about law and data protection,
• act on their own terms "past the boss"

and thus completely remove and incapacitate data protection to the benefit of a left-wing dominance and silencing every criticism against the database-scale collection of political opinions and arbitrary measures like bank account closures - at least against those who are politically uncomfortable at the moment.

Right now and for years, but increasingly more nowadays, I've got the impression that, in terms of data protection, nothing works anymore, that the agencies are completely on ice or reduced to the task of fighting against political opponents, to commit the really big data protection abuses for political reasons.

I've got the impression that they're currently ignoring every law, every right that's politically inopportune as they need it, not by officially abolishing it from the top, but by staffing the agencies and courts from the bottom with personnel that simply ensures that law is no longer being applied, and nobody notices because nobody can see the many tiny individual cases.

Do we still have something like data protection?

 

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Cc @Null because European data protection is a topic you're passionate about

imo this is just another case of laws not mattering at all - even "good" laws - as long as law enforcement is being monopolized by the state. The state makes it illegal for private parties to have police and courts, therefore the only choice is going to state courts and state agencies, and those always have an interest in furthering the state. Furthermore, since all those people are paid from tax money - irrespective of voluntarily paying satisfied customers - they have strong incentives to minimize the actual work they do, because, of course, the less work you have to do and the more you earn for it, the better off you are.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Do we still have something like data protection?

Nein

imo this is just another case of laws not mattering at all - even "good" laws - as long as law enforcement is being monopolized by the state. The state makes it illegal for private parties to have police and courts

I would suggest that the American experience demonstrates the opposite. We do effectively have private courts in the form of mandatory arbitration, which effectively amounts to "Big corporation wins". Privatizing justice would just mean that we'd add even more entities to the above-the-law list.