First it was Google Street View, then Facebook, now another sinister new American data octopus is stretching out its tentacles to abuse German privacy rights anywhere and everywhere it can: Census.com!

Oops! False alarm. It looks like it’s a real German census and doesn’t even have a .com at all. But I’m nevertheless sure that the opposition to it will be massive, just like it was twenty-five years ago in West Germany when an uncountable number of Germans (think census–get it?) took to the streets to protest the government’s evil plan and even boycotted the survey.

Oops again already. Another false alarm. Nobody seems to give a hoot this time. Now everybody is lining up to get counted like sheep. What ever happened to civil disobedience? Even a little uncivil disobedience would be OK with me, people. Pitiful.

Statisticians predict that the survey may well reveal the German population is smaller than thought. The statistics office predicts that up to 1.3 million people still counted on regional population tallies may not actually exist.