It has occured to me that Germany has always had the strictist ID laws (as we began under martial law and foreign rule), and digital IDs are now the norm, but we also have the tightest privacy, erasure, and opt-out laws. Germans have been spied on by governments for nearly a century and we're wary of it.
The argument "If you don't have anything to hide..." doesn't make any sense, anywhere, but especially not here. Of course, we have things to hide. Don't be silly. Everyone has things to hide. In fact, we don't even know all of what we'd like to hide, yet, which is why universal powers of deletion and retroactive permission adjustments are so vitally important.
We like our privacy and we like our monetary transactions fungible: cash notes, gold, Bitcoin. That is why Germans are heavily overrepresented in the Nostr and Bitcoin spaces.
Nobody needs to know what we're buying. Foreign visitors laugh at us and think we're quaint and backward, counting out coins for groceries and purchasing clothes with cash, but we like it that way. Furthermore, we are uncommonly free of debt and can't be easily terrorized by credit rating agencies. Our cashiers learn to count back change and our waiters will split the bill 11 ways. Competent cashiers and waitstaff are the frontline defense of economic privacy. It isn't enough to place a Lightning terminal on the counter, as a marketing gimmick. The staff needs to know how it works.
Importantly, our privacy laws also apply to private companies. As companies like Google, Apple, and Tesla have found out, to their detriment. I think that's essential, otherwise governments have private companies skirt privacy laws for them. The UK 18+ law has definitively exposed that.
As has the Telegram fiasco. A company that essentially runs pseudo-private chatrooms that it holds the keys for, is effectively a honeypot. We have not ever received an explanation for why they kept this backdoor open, but France would now also like a peek. Handover the keys, please.
Government regulations and industry lobyying mean that one hand tends to wash the other. In many cases, private businesses are merely the longest arm of the law, and digitization accelerates that effect.
The right to pay in cash, and ensuring the ease of such transactions, whether in Bitcoin or central bank bills, is the first fight. The second fight is the right to effective encryption. The third fight is the right to privacy and to control of your own data, whether private companies or governments hold it.