What do you like to do on vacation?
I travel a lot for business, so I do not see my wife and children so much. For me, vacation means above all time for the family. Usually I take three or four times a year off, so 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 holidays; then we often visit the in-laws or my sister and her family.
Can you tell us about a holiday you remember so well, and also tell what made your holiday so memorable?
When our children were with their grandmother during the Whitsun holidays for a few days, my wife and I took the opportunity to finally visit our old college friend Karen in her house on the Baltic Sea. When we arrived at Karen on Friday evenings, there was a warm reunion and Karen's unmistakable vegetable lasagna. While dining, Karen also mentioned a certain Axel "coming home late today." We were pleased to hear that Karen apparently had a new boyfriend and were looking forward to meeting him the next day. The big surprise was on Saturday at breakfast, when Axel came in to the kitchen door and my wife and I immediately recognized him: Axel, the longtime friend of my wife's youth. Because of me she had done with Axel. You can imagine that this breakfast with Karen and Axel not 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 left between him and my wife that looked like "more than friendship". With the discovery that we were both fishing for a hobby, 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 growing 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 uses of new technologies. A particularly urgent problem that I see here is that of data security. If you use the Internet, you are more likely to reveal more data than you or he often knows: after all, not only will the data that we knowingly leave behind, for example when we buy something on the Internet, be stored. But also search histories, camera or microphone recordings and even unpublished data - texts, for example, which we have entered into the Facebook Messenger, but have nevertheless revised again - are collected on the servers of the Internet giants. Combined with our bank details and private e-mails, these companies can effortlessly create detailed personality profiles that they can only dream of when monitoring the illiberal regimes that we all learned in school.
Many people respond to this issue with a typical and very meaningful gesture: they shrug their shoulders and emphasize that personally they have "nothing to hide". However, from history 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 not to hide, what "allowed", "tolerated" and "forbidden" or even is dangerous. In my opinion, therefore, more information and easier-to-use tools are needed that do not deprive individuals of the extent of surveillance that is technically possible today, as de facto most of us currently do are forced to do. Only when we have mature internet citizens can we make sure that we have mastered this new technology - and not technology ourselves.