acs.jpgAnybody else get one of these? It’s called “The American Community Survey” and it landed in my in basket this afternoon. Click on the image to enlarge.

Briefly, it asks questions about mental health, the number of bathrooms in your home, what language you speak and read, and a couple dozen pages filled with more “none of your fuckin’ business” questions.

I got a similar mailing a few weeks ago and shit-canned it, after shredding, of course.

According to Wikipedia

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a project of the U.S. Census Bureau that replaces the long form in the decennial census. It is an ongoing statistical survey, and thus more current than information obtained by the long form. Many Americans found filling out the long form to be burdensome and intrusive, and its unpopularity was a factor in the declining response rate to the decennial census. In 1995, the Bureau began a process to change the means of demographic, housing, social, and economic information from the census long form to the ACS. Testing began in 1996, and the ACS program began producing test data in 2000, 2001, and 2002. The full program is expected to be implemented by 2010.

Wikipedia goes on to make the following claim (emphasis mine):

The Department of Commerce claims that those who receive a survey form are required to provide answers to a long list of questions about themselves and their families, including their profession, how much money they earn, their source of health insurance, their preferred mode of transportation to and from work, and the amount of money they pay for housing and utilities. Those who decline to answer these questions may receive follow-up phone calls and/or visits to their homes from Census Bureau personnel, and are threatened with prosecution and fines. No person has ever been charged with a crime for refusing to answer the ACS survey, which several US Representatives have challenged as unauthorized by the census act and violative of the Right to Financial Privacy Act.

I’m not sure how I want to handle this. One thing is for sure I would sign a petition against this crap - like this one: Stop the ACS Petition.