Hundreds of thousands of employees have had their cellphone, e-mail and computer records secretly searched. Companies say they did it to expose misconduct.
Reporting from Berlin -- Growing up in West Germany, Lothar Schroeder never knew that terrible sense of violation suffered by people in the communist East at the hands of the secret police who tailed them, bugged their homes and recruited neighbors and even family members to snitch on them.
Now he knows.
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But it's not a totalitarian state doing the snooping this time; it's some of the country's largest corporations -- big names in telecommunications, transportation and retail.
Last year, authorities informed Schroeder that Deutsche Telekom had secretly combed through his cellphone records, apparently to root out the source of leaks to the news media. Schroeder, a union representative on the company's board of supervisors, was stunned.
“I never could believe that Deutsche Telekom would use their data in this way, never," he said, adding ruefully, “Perhaps I'm a little bit naive."
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is being rocked by a string of spying scandals that have staggered residents with their scale and brought back painful memories of the prying eyes of Big Brother during the Cold War.
The firms have admitted spying on hundreds of thousands of employees, including monitoring their e-mails and installing hidden cameras to see how many bathroom breaks they took or whether co-workers were falling in love.
The breaches of privacy have claimed the jobs of two top executives and triggered a parliamentary investigation. Lawmakers are also discussing a revamp of Germany's nebulous and somewhat outmoded rules on data protection, to clarify what kind of prying is allowed and under what conditions.
The most shocking scandal so far involves the state-owned railway firm, Deutsche Bahn, the country's biggest employer.
In January, after an expose by a newsmagazine, the company was forced to acknowledge that it had spied on 173,000 employees -- nearly three-quarters of its workforce.
