A look back at some podcast episodes I released as this whole COVID-19 crisis developed.

Due to the uncertain times we all live in at the moment, I’m currently very busy with work and it’s hard for me to plan pretty much anything. I very much live from one day to the next, working as much as I possibly can and not sleeping enough. Because of this, I haven’t kept this blog up to date with all the things I have been doing recently and I’m trying to catch up with that now.

One of the things I’ve been busy with is releasing a lot of episodes of my weekly privacy podcast The Private Citizen. In fact, it’s currently more of a “weekly plus” situation, as I’ve released more than one episode for a number weeks now. One reason for that is that I’m spending a lot of time on the current coronavirus situation, as I feel that is definitely the most important privacy topic right now. I’m also producing non-coronavirus-related episodes as well, though, as some preople prefer those, at the moment. And who could blame them? It’s hard enough to escape all the madness as it is…

But if you’re not actively trying to avoid these topics, you might be interested in the following three episodes of the podcast that chronicle how this whole coronavirus situation we’re in right now developed. Each of them illuminates different aspects of the crisis from different viewpoints.

The Private Citizen 8: Coronavirus Curfew
Tuesday, 24 March 2020

In this episode, I look at the curfew order for Germany, which had just been passed by the government a few days before. I analyse the context of the lockdown and data on COVID-19 that had just come out of Italy. I talk about the privacy impact all of this is having and discuss the first tracking attempt by the German government via cell tower data. There’s also a short discussion of the concept of Datensparsamkeit and the first reports of privacy issues with Zoom, which started surfacing at the time. If you want to listen to that episode, visit the corresponding show notes page.

The Private Citizen 10: Flatten the Curve
Sunday, 29 March 2020

A few days later, I invited a former colleague of mine, Alexander Spier from heise online, onto the show to have a debate about the shelter in place orders, whether these can “flatten the curve” and if that concept even makes sense. It was a very stimulating discussion, I thought, and remains revelant even now; even as I become more and more convinced that the lockdown in Germany wasn’t necessary at all. Alex was a very nice first interview for the podcast and I feel like that format worked well. If you’d like to listen to this particular episode of the show, head over to the show notes page for episode 10.

The Private Citizen 11: Off the Grid
Wednesday, 1 April 2020

Episode 11 might have been released on the 1^st of April, but it wasn’t a joke. Much like I do now, I didn’t feel like joking about the situation back then either. This episode was the first episode I didn’t record in my home studio – it was recorded in my parents' home in Duisburg. The episode takes a bit of a different tack and focuses mainly on developing ideas to help us avoid phone tracking. This concept of “off the grid” is something I tend to revisit in future episodes of the podcast. You can listen to that episode by visiting this page.

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