>It's a nuanced right
Well, having lived there I'd describe it thus: You might get shouted at for taking a harmless picture at a conference; They brag about their great "data protection" laws, and the same same day you read in the news how yet another of their universities got hacked and how some incompetent government agency leaked the sensitive private information of hundreds of thousands of their citizens. Not that anyone cares or that anyone would get punished for it. But don't you dare forget adding cookie popups to your website or trying to build a finance app without extremely invasive and questionable KYC.
Privacy-mindedness with German characteristics.
> They brag about their great "data protection" laws, and the same same day you read in the news how yet another of their universities got hacked and how some incompetent government agency leaked the sensitive private information of hundreds of thousands of their citizens.
I would claim those people from Germany who are very privacy-minded indeed have a huge distrust of these data collections exactly because they know that sooner or later someone will crack these systems.
FYI, cookie popups aren't required by law and the USA is the cause of global financial KYC. Hopefully the upcoming dedollarization fixes that.