Everybody’s out to get me these days, or my data. Out to get them I mean, actually, over here in Germany.
It’s bad enough that Google is googling the very streets they live on. Now, if a German wants to open up a McDonald’s or a Subway franchise, he or she has to let these potential employers know shockingly private and even intimate matters about him or her selves.
You know, private and intimate stuff like “were you ever directly or indirectly involved in terrorist activities.”
Needless to say, everybody over here is totally empört (shocked) about the matter. No, not so much about such indiscrete questioning like this, they’re shocked that a German would actually sink as low as to want to open up a McDonald’s or a Subway franchise.
Die Bewerber haben sogar Auskunft zu erteilen, ob sie “jemals direkt oder indirekt an terroristischen Aktivitäten beteiligt” gewesen seien.
Observing Hermann 
HO,
These types of articles always crack me up. Back in the mid-80s, when I moved to Berlin and sublet an apartment in Moabit, I had to go to the local police station and do an Anmeldung. As it turned out, the guy whose apartment I was subletting had, in fact, moved to a different apartment in the same building, so I had to make a couple trips back and forth. Anyway, on the last trip, for verification purposes, they let me behind the counter to look at the screen that showed the entire building with each residence numbered and occupants named. That floored me. Wow! The German authorities knew who lived in each and every house and apartment in the entire country — all of that information on some kind of central database.
I simply could not imagine such a system in the US. Americans move too much. I had lived in half a dozen US cities (in dozens of different apartments) and in other countries by the time I had gone to the police station to register for that sublet. I see Germans’ fear of Google and StreetView as just more examples of anti-Americanism. If they were really concerned about privacy, they would protest having to notify the local authorities every time they move to a new apartment.
*
And this is just funny. From Bild:
Hollywood-Groupie wollte Oral-Sex mit Christoph Waltz
Wie die „New York Post“ berichtet, bekam einer der Gäste mit, wie sie Christoph Waltz zuflüsterte, dass sie „super Blowjobs“ gäbe.
She must have really meant “super” because she capitalized “blowjobs.” Now that’s top-shelf stuff.
*