> it's absurd to think you have, or even deserve, to use someone else's property for whatever you want

How you read this into my comment is beyond me. An employee cannot use the company-provided resources in whatever way they like. If they do, that's grounds for termination.

German labor laws recognize that total surveillance is not aligning with the values of a free society. Life does not stop at work, every company event should tell you that. Instead there needs to be indications that the employee is acting in bad faith, then the employer can "surveil" the employee in a limited fashion, like read work emails (not private emails) or search their desk. The same as police cannot search you whenever they like without reason.

It’s worth remembering that many Germans still have direct experience of living in the surveillance state of East Germany, and I would expect know better than most how these tools can be used

This is not only a fact in Germany. Belgium has comparable protections. I'd assume the EU has them.

I think the parent poster meant that the memory of a surveillance State is alive and well in East Germany because it was only two generations ago.

In other countries like France and Belgium, the surveillance State has been aimed at specific communities and at remote colonies lately, but a generalized state of surveillance has not been seen since the 1940s so people tend to underestimate the dangers of that based on little living memory of how authoritarianism grows.

Perhaps we should return to feudalism, as it is absurd to think you deserve to use a lord’s property without putting in any labor for them.

To me it’s absurd that the system is such that the one’s doing the most don’t get to decide what happens with the fruits of their labor, and are under the mercy of whoever happens to own that workplace.