New prevention tools

Technology is valuable where it makes things more accessible. When we think, for example, of counselling services, whether it is a telephone counselling service for people who are mentally burdened, or even perpetrator counselling, then it is nice when digitalisation makes it possible. I don’t have to go there physically, I don’t need the service near me, but I can call or I can perhaps do it anonymously in a chat. These would be ways in which people could get help with problems, where digitisation significantly increases accessibility. Or, for example, in the field of health. Stable health care is also a security measure, a preventive measure for many of the risks we face in this world. And here too, if it is done properly, without surveillance, accessibility can do a great deal to make people safer. Data minimisation is always a good recommendation. Unfortunately this is also made too difficult for us. Actually, on the one hand, politics has a duty to create laws that protect us. On the other hand, platforms themselves should take responsibility and not collect data that is not necessary for the service itself. As long as that is not the case, we must use digital self-defence, as we call it. For example, there are ways to change the browser, to install programs called “add-ons”, so that I am not spied on by the advertising industry on the Internet. I can change the messenger. I don’t have to stay at WhatsApp and risk Facebook spying on me. I can also use a free messenger from free software such as Signal, where I can be relatively sure that no one is looking over my shoulder and it is encrypted. Above all, we must get away from this story, we have nothing to hide. We always have something to hide. This is our privacy, our private life. There are things I wouldn’t tell strangers on the street. What a lot of people actually want to say is “I didn’t do anything wrong” and that can be believed. A blanket surveillance is always wrong. It is always disproportionate in a constitutional state to expose the entire population to a surveillance measure that has not been proven to be of any benefit. It massively encroaches on fundamental rights and then they say “well, at that time this one incident could be solved in that way”. The proportions are completely out of balance here. We have to be careful that governments, and especially domestic politicians, do not reinterpret the concept of prevention. Actual prevention that creates security gives social support so that people do not become violent and anti-democratic in the first place. At the moment, we are seeing a trend, which is reflected, for example, in the stricter federal police laws, that prevention means: the police may intervene earlier. But this is something that again causes chilling effects, that is, a kind of intimidation. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do now. I haven’t done anything wrong but I still don’t know for sure what legitimate things I am allowed to do without getting into conflict with the police, which nobody wants to. And we must not allow this to be portrayed as prevention.

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