Last week, a hand-written poster appeared on a fence in my Berlin neighborhood. It bore the slogan: “Fight digital totalitarianism” and appeared to be signed “The Analogs.”

Just days earlier, the German government had proposed mass data collection to trace the spread of the new coronavirus. The Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in the central German city of Halle advocated the voluntary collection of mobile phone data, in order to gain a better overview of the epidemic, even suggesting that data protection legislation be “reevaluated and, if necessary, adjusted in the short term.” Involuntary mass collection of location data has also been floated at the government level, before being withdrawn.

In an exceptionally privacy-conscious society such as Germany, these ideas have sparked a debate about how much state intrusion citizens are willing to accept, in order to bring an end to the national lockdown.

Compared to other European countries Germans “are much more sensitive towards privacy,” said Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, of the Berlin-based Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. “This is really a German thing, the importance of data protection.”