I want to address a topic that really made me angry today. On this website that I often point out mistakes from, there was this article about my workplace (Agentur für Arbeit - the national employment agency). It was about a "scandal" with data protection.
The story went like this: Some unemployed people went to a talk show on tv and talked about their difficult situation. The days after, thousands of employees of my workplace throughout the country accessed the computer files of these customers who went to the talk show, because obviously, they were really interesting, so they wanted to read up on them. It became public that employees are so interested in people they see on tv. That's the scandal.
Below the article was a comment function, and of course, lots of idiots had to make their comments: "typical for Germany", "why not just implant a chip into anyone's brain", "they know what we're up to anyway", "the whole government is after us","it's like the spy system in former East Germany" and so on. Then I posted my comment and made some things clear:
1. Nobody in our institution is allowed to let any information leak to outsiders. What's in the agency, stays in the agency, no matter how many people in the agency are interested. Anything else would be a violation of laws and would result in being fired and possibly sent to prison.
2. It is a useful thing that the information is accessible throughout the whole country, because customers move, and if the information was only accessible to the employees who currently deal with the case, it would either require people at a different agency to ask the customer for all the information again, or it would take a while to unlock the files. Both would drive the customers, who are naturally very impatient and hate our agency, insane.
3. People who go to a tv show to striptease their life should not be surprised if they get a lot of attention afterwards.
More things should be pointed out:
4. Curiousity is a human character trait. If you trigger it, people will go after you.
5. Whenever I forbid customers at my workplace to change or ask for things on behalf of someone else (their children or husbands / wives), they become angry and never get it. They think I like to annoy them, but what I try to do is to stick to the rules. In 99 of 100 cases, a person trying to change something on behalf of someone who is not present will be a normal thing, without bad intentions, but in 1 out of 100 cases, it will be a jealous wife who caught her husband cheating on her and wants revenge. That is the reason why we don't let anyone access the files. But strangely enough, it's only a scandal when it's the way it's written in the article. People never see the other side of things.
Even worse, I once went to an authority where they asked me to show my private emails to them. And when I checked if it's legal, I was told that yes, it is legal, they are allowed to ask for that and I have to comply. Is that not a much bigger scandal? No... because it only affects me and few other people who add up to a minority that will never have a voice loud enough to scream.
It's really, really bullshit. You know, if the people at my workplace change the computer systems and make files harder to access anywhere in Germany, it will lead to side effects that will cause anger among the customers. People will wonder why it's impossible to access files. Even today, people come to us and say "hey, why don't you have any files, I was there only 5 years ago". Well, all the files will be deleted at some point, and that is also for a good reason. But it's never good enough. Never ever.
There was one scandal that I would really call a scandal at my workplace. One colleague (no idea who it was) tried to park her car on the public parking lot, but a customer took the place just before her and she was so angry that she showed him the finger and said "wait until I process your documents"... the crazy thing is that this happened in front of the customer and a witness that belongs to the customer. I would not be surprised if the person responsible will be fired. The damage done to the image of the corporation is so immense, and every day I try so hard to give my workplace a good image, but it's so hard with all the prejudice against us.
What remains is the fact that customers like to feel like kings, and they always want it their way. They complain about anything, and nothing is ever good enough. At the same time, they live in one of the wealthiest countries of all and receive benefits that other countries don't even offer in the first place. They are so spoilt, I sometimes say it's time for another world war so people learn to be humble again. Humility is a rare good nowadays.
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