What do you like to do on holiday?
I travel a lot on business, so I don't see my wife and children so much. For me, holiday means especially time for the family. Normally I take three to four times a year, so that we can all go away together: In the autumn holidays we like to go hiking holiday in my homeland in the Allgäu, during the Easter holidays we ski, and in summer we spend two weeks at the campsite in Southern France. In addition, there are of course 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 especially well, and also what exactly made the holiday so memorable?
When our children were at their grandma's for a few days during the Whitsun holidays, my wife and I took the opportunity to finally visit our old student friend Karen in her home on the Baltic Sea. When we arrived on Friday evening at Karen's, there was a warm goodbye and Karen's unmistakable vegetable lasagna. At 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 anxious to meet him the next day. The big surprise was then on Saturday at breakfast, when Axel came to the kitchen door and my wife and I immediately recognized him: Axel, the longtime friend of my wife. She broke up with Axel because of me. You can imagine that this breakfast with Karen and Axel did not just begin to relax. 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 wasn't very important for me to see that there was obviously nothing left between him and my wife, which looked like "more than friendship." With the discovery that we are both a hobby fly fishing, axel and I finally could break the ice. In the end, we even agreed that Axel and Karen will 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 in my opinion we need a more productive debate on democratic, socially beneficial use of new technologies. One particularly urgent problem I see here is that of data security. Those who use the Internet today give more data of themselves than they or they often know: after all, not only the data that we knowingly leave, if we buy something on the Internet, for example, is stored. But also search histories, camera or microphone recordings and even unpublished data – texts, for example, which we have entered in the Facebook Messenger but have revised again – are collected on the servers of the Internet giants. In connection with our database and private e-mails, for example, these companies can easily create detailed personality profiles, of which the surveillance services of those illiberal regimes, of which we have all learned in school lessons , could only dream.
Many people react to this subject with a typical and very meaningful gesture: they shrug their shoulders and emphasize that they personally have "nothing to hide". From history, however, we should have learned 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 thus "allowed", "tolerated" and "forbidden" or even dangerous. In my opinion, therefore, there is a need for both more education and easier-to-use tools, with which the individual does not have to extradite to the level of surveillance that is technically possible today, as most of us at the moment are de facto are forced to do. Only when we have mature Internet citizens can we make sure that we master this new technology – and not the technology to us.