What do you like to do on vacation?
I travel a lot on business, so I don't see my wife and children as much. For me, vacation means, above all, family time. I usually take three to four times off a year so that we can all go away together: In the autumn holidays we like to go hiking in my home in the Allgäu, in the Easter holidays we go skiing, and in the summer we spend two weeks at the campsite in South France. In addition, there are of course the Christmas holidays and bank holidays; then we often visit the in-laws or my sister and her family.
Can you tell us about a vacation that you remember particularly well and also tell us what exactly made the vacation so memorable?
When our children were with their grandmother for a couple of days during the Whitsun vacation, my wife and I took the opportunity to finally visit our old college friend Karen in her house on the Baltic Sea. When we got to Karen on Friday evening, there was a warm reunion and Karen's distinctive vegetable lasagne. Over dinner, Karen also mentioned a certain Axel, who is “coming home late this morning.” We were happy to hear that Karen apparently had a new boyfriend, and we were excited to meet him the next day. The big surprise came on Saturday at breakfast when Axel came through the kitchen door and my wife and I recognized him immediately: Axel, my wife's long-time childhood friend. She broke up with Axel because of me. You can imagine that this breakfast with Karen and Axel didn't start out relaxed. But perhaps the biggest surprise for me personally was that I met a really nice person in Axel that weekend: interested and good-natured. Of course, it was also 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 for flies as a hobby, Axel and I were finally able to break the ice. In the end we even agreed that Axel and Karen would come to us in the country in September. Axel and I want to go fishing together.
What is your view of the increasing importance of what technology is in our everyday life?
On the whole, I am positive about technological progress, but in my opinion we need a more productive debate about democratic, socially beneficial ways of using new technologies. A particularly pressing problem that I see here is that of data security. Those who use the Internet today reveal more information about themselves than they or they often know: After all, it is not only the data that we knowingly leave behind when we buy something on the Internet that is stored. But also search histories, camera or microphone recordings and even unpublished data - texts, for example, that we entered in Facebook Messenger but then revised - are collected on the servers of the Internet giants. In conjunction with our bank details and private emails, these companies can, if they want, effortlessly create detailed personality profiles that the surveillance services of those illiberal regimes we all learned from in school could only dream of.
Many people respond to this topic with a typical and very expressive gesture: They shrug their shoulders and emphasize that they personally have "nothing to hide". However, we should have learned from history that times can change quickly and that it is only a matter of definition what someone has to hide and what not, i.e. what is “allowed”, “tolerated” and “forbidden” or even is dangerous. In my opinion, there is a need for both more education and more easily usable tools with which the individual does not have to expose himself to the extent of surveillance that is technically possible today, as most of us are de facto at the moment are forced to do. Only when we have mature Internet citizens can we ensure that we have mastered this new technology - and not the technology us.