What do you like to do on holiday?

I travel a lot on business, so I don't see my wife and children that much. For me, holidays therefore mean time for the family. Normally I take three or four times a year off, so that we can all go away together: in the autumn holidays we like to go hiking holidays in my home in the Allgäu, in the Easter holidays we ski, and in the summer we spend two weeks at the campsite in the south of France. In addition, of course, there are the Christmas holidays and holidays; then we often visit the in-laws or my sister and her family.

Can you tell us about a holiday that you remember particularly well, and also tell us what exactly made the holiday so memorable?

When our children were with their grandma for a couple of days during the Pentecost holidays, my wife and I took the opportunity to finally visit our old student friend Karen in her house on the Baltic Sea. When we arrived at Karen's home on Friday night, there was a warm reunion and Karen's distinctive vegetable lasagne. Over dinner, Karen also mentioned a certain Axel, who "comes home late today." We were happy to hear that Karen apparently had a new boyfriend and were excited to meet him the next day. The big surprise came on Saturday at breakfast, when Axel came in to the kitchen door and my wife and I immediately recognized him: Axel, my wife's longtime childhood friend. Because of me, she had stopped with Axel. You can imagine that this breakfast with Karen and Axel didn't start very relaxed. But perhaps the biggest surprise for me personally was that I met a really nice person in Axel this weekend: interested and good-natured. Of course, it was not insignificant for me to see that there was obviously nothing between him and my wife that looked like "more than friendship". With the discovery that we both fish edits hobbyists, Axel and I were finally able to break the ice. In the end, we even arranged for Axel and Karen to come to our country in September. Axel and I want to go fishing together.

What is your view of the increasing importance of technology in our everyday lives?

On the whole, I am positive about technological progress, but I think we need a more productive debate on democratic, socially conducive uses of new technologies. One of the most urgent problems I see here is data security. Those who use the Internet now reveal more data about themselves than they often know: after all, it is not only those data that we knowingly leave behind that we leave behind when we buy something on the Internet, for example. But also search histories, camera or microphone recordings and even unpublished data – texts, for example, which we have entered into Facebook Messenger but have revised again – are collected on the servers of the internet giants. Combined, for example, with our bank data and private emails, these companies can easily create detailed personality profiles, if they wish, that the surveillance services of those illiberal regimes we all learned from in school could only dream of.

Many people react to this topic with a typical and very meaningful gesture: they shrug their shoulders and stress that they personally have "nothing to hide". History, however, should have taught us that times can change quickly, and that it is only a matter of defining what someone has to hide and what is not, which is "allowed," "tolerated" and "forbidden" or even dangerous. In my opinion, therefore, we need both more information and more readily usable tools, which do not require individuals to surrender as defencelessly to the level of surveillance that is technically possible today, as most of us are actually forced to do at the moment. Only when we have mature Internet citizens can we ensure that we master this new technology – and not technology us.