Spying and the abuse of data

Setting up cameras and monitoring employees' toilet breaks, as the supermarket chain Lidl did; keeping a "black money" fund for kickbacks to officials in developing countries, as Siemens allegedly did; diverting money to pay for call girls for refractory board members, as Volkswagen did . . . German executives have not been at their best lately. But nothing has so shocked the public as the latest allegations that Deutsche Telekom, the largest telephone group in Europe, used a private investigator to spy on journalists and board members. Germany has had, in general, an admirable system for protecting privacy. It is crumbling not because its elite has made a few mistakes, but because of new economic and social pressures that businesses in all countries face.

What Telekom did is emerging in dribs and drabs. In January 2005 - when Kai-Uwe Ricke, its chief executive, was trying to right the company's finances by cutting 45,000 jobs - the German business magazine Capital published an article based on top-level Telekom documents. Mr Ricke and the chairman of the supervisory board, Klaus Zumwinkel, believed the leak was coming from the board. They decided to plug it. A company called Network Deutschland was hired. It is alleged to have monitored hundreds of thousands of phone calls in an effort to find the mole. It may have traced individuals' whereabouts with mobile phone data and even kept tabs on Blackstone, the US investment group, which bought a stake in the company in 2006.

Earlier this year, Ralf K