From the Spackeria, from tin foil hats and from loss of control - The wonderful world of Isotopp. Worthwhile consideration of data protection, data traces, the inevitable accumulation of data volumes and the inevitability of the accessibility and evaluation of this data.
I myself am always sitting between the chairs of the tin foil hats and Spackeria - on the one hand, I want data avoidance and have my problems with the data collection mania in some places, on the other hand, I am close to technology and enthusiastic about it and am therefore automatically collected in many data pots. And I am absolutely aware of how much can be found out about me online if someone puts it all together.
I see, just like Isotopp presents it in the article, a massive (probably inevitable) failure of legal data protection - but I myself see a certain differentiation between data that arises in the voluntary context of the use of technical services (even if the user may not directly notice these data) and data that are collected in the state context.
The state sets up data silos only under the negative aspect - a state-created database is always designed under the aspect of general suspicion. The state does not collect the data of persons involved in visa procedures in order to provide them with targeted information and services related to visa procedures - the sole purpose is law enforcement. However, this automatically suspects all persons involved in visa procedures of terrorism and other crimes - because otherwise one would not need to record their data. The executive of the state hates the disorderly citizens and deeply distrusts them, therefore they must be controlled.
A private economic pile of data has a much more banal goal - market economic exploitation. This is, as crazy as it may sound to some, much more preferable to me. Google will not use the data to negatively interpret my political beliefs and put me on a no-fly list because I criticize the state - they just want to show me better-placed advertising. In a certain way, one can rely on the reduced field of vision of capitalists, it is much more positively influenced than that of politicians. Data sets are potential businesses - not potential attackers.
For this reason, I find the current activity of various state data protection officers in the private economic or even directly private sector (warning blogs for the use of Google Analytics) laughable to embarrassing, if the same data protection officers do not stand up to projects like those that are coming up in the Interior Ministry or other state authorities.
How can a data protection officer expect to be taken seriously if he loudly complains about the location data falling off the iPhone and rails against Apple, but at the same time does not make any attempts to stop this crazy EU commissioner who has plans for EU-wide, suspicionless data retention that would violate our Basic Law (just as the data retention already failed in Karlsruhe that was spied out in Berlin)?