As a German, I don't think the issue is with our handling of personal data. The real issue is Kleinstaaterei, a not-quite-translatable word that describes every small administrative entity insisting on doing its own thing and failing to see the bigger picture.
What today is Germany used to be about 100 separate nations until 1871, and a still somewhat loose federation until 1918. I think the mentality from that time is still pervasive today in many areas, particularly in bureaucracy.
Add to that that Germany is large enough to make the other EU countries play by its rules most of the time. That removes incentive to overcome nonsensical idiosyncrasies. Estonia is under a lot more pressure here because they cannot win by weight alone.
This.
On top of the dedication, Estonia has the advantage of being a single entity in comparison to Germanies federal org. (Population wise it's also only slightly bigger than Germanies second smallest Bundesland, the Saarland)
If you want to be intimidated try this, already reduced, chart of the state of implementation of the Onlinezugangsgesetz (OZG).
In my experience Germans love bureaucracy,it makes them feel safe and gives them "trust" for the system even if everyone hates it. Additionally it "empowers" the people (and not in a good way) who are given a tiny amount of power wrt some mundane issue that you need to resolve at some city/state office. (The "soup nazi" gag is spot in Seinfeld).
Seriously here in "DDR" you wait in a line to get a waiting number for starting your real wait. (I'm looking at you zulassungstelle).
I've heard that Germans are very skeptical about sharing data and have lots of fears about privacy.
Here in Estonia our government systems work efficiently because our data is shared between government departments and ministries in a safe way. There is only one place that stores the addresses of people, there is only one place that has knows about the cars or properties I own and so on. There is a law against asking people who interact with the state for data that it already has.
> What today is Germany used to be about 100 separate nations until 1871, and a still somewhat loose federation until 1918. I think the mentality from that time is still pervasive today in many areas, particularly in bureaucracy.
Hmm... France on the contrary comes from an extremely centralised political and cultural model, yet many things (like social security!) and run in a myriad of independent offices compartmented by geographical location (100 départements) and by sub-domain, which do not communicate or share, send the client/citizen to the next one and blame each other for anything.
For a few decades, there has been a move to regionalisation (a pale will to copy German Länder), which make things worse, building another important geographical layer for various things. Depending on the mood of the year, stuff will either depend on departments or regions. Or on the new thing of the 2010's: huge groups of municipalities, almost as large as departments.
But almost all of those get their funding from the state anyway.
If you take minimum welfare for example, it is handled by departments. Why? No idea, it doesn't make any sense. The rules, the amounts are nation-wide. The funding is national: the state gives money to the departments for that task. So you'd think "I should ask the department" for it?". No because the department gives the money it got from the state to the family branch of the social security. Which is nation-wide? Yes, but it is an association of a hundred independent local offices. Each of them being a private law organisation and not public law. While obviously being a public service, which redistributes public funding. Note that in some departments there used to be several different offices for that same role until recently... Of course each department, and each office will develop its own culture of unwritten rules along the years, so the result is you won't be treated equally depending on where you are, whereas the laws are supposed to be the same.
This is all nuts. Sometimes there are historical reasons gone bad. Sometimes it is just some perverse invention.
I mostly gave examples which remain in the same domain. Now just imagine the madness you have to deal with offices from different domains... Also keep in mind while picturing that, that most of the people who work there do not have the smallest interest in having things going smoothly, files closed quickly, job well done and so on; their only happiness comes from bugging customers/citizen or bugging and blaming another service/office; the only way to get something done is to start yelling at them, then miracles happen: in a few minutes (after several months of being bounced here and there for whatever wrong reason) 'lost' files are found, 'necessary' documents are in fact not needed, everything is ready and solved, that's magical. I wish they were corrupted, it would be nicer and easier, but they aren't even. That's just French culture.
What today is Germany used to be about 100 separate nations until 1871, and a still somewhat loose federation until 1918. I think the mentality from that time is still pervasive today in many areas, particularly in bureaucracy.
Add to that that Germany is large enough to make the other EU countries play by its rules most of the time. That removes incentive to overcome nonsensical idiosyncrasies. Estonia is under a lot more pressure here because they cannot win by weight alone.