Tracking evasion is close to the concept we in Germany call "Datensparsamkeit" or data scarcity — the idea that only the data that needs to be collected for a certain purpose should be collected.
The idea is: Data that just isn't there cannot be lost, abused or stolen. Or phrased differently: Data is also a liability for you and your users and you should balance this liability with the use it has for you.
The idea comes from Germany's Nazi past, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands where religion was a field in the official documents, which lead to an very efficient genocide.
Germany asks for your religion during your address registration, to collect church tax. It's one of the first forms you'll fill after moving to Germany.
However, this is largely correct. German offices don't even talk to each other without your consent. It can be frustrating at times.
Germany also has some of the strongest photography laws I know of. You have a certain expectation of privacy even in public.
When the church and the government are too tightly intertwined, religious freedom ceases to exist. They are separate and should remain separate.
In the United States, most Protestant churches are run by tithe (voluntary donation) and are not taxed at all (the Establishment Clause) or are paid as mandatory fee directly to the synagogue or local congregation. Most Protestant churches in the U.S. have seen declining membership and tithing, but that is not the fault of the government, and church tax is precisely the opposite of what Jesus and Paul laid out, as well as the allocation of tithes in Malachi.
In neither case should or can the government get involved.
Most churches in the U.S. are not megachurches. Most are much smaller. The abuses of a few shouldn't taint the whole concept.
And they start charging you without telling you directly (by a letter) or getting your consent! First thing I tell everyone moving here is that they should be careful with that form and be atheists officially. I ended up paying 4 years of tax before they relaxed the process.
I don't want to be a devils advocate, but why is it a problem that you paid a church tax?
In Germany, members of the church pay for the church service, it is made available to them by the church. It's just how it is, you pay the tax, and then you can marry for free, attend church for free, baptise your children free of charge, ...
If you don't want to use or don't need their services, you can always cancel your church membership. It costs one visit to Bürgeramt and a few euros.
I am sick of people staying in church and complaining that they should not pay. Before church tax, everyone had to pay through taxes, even people that are not members of catholic or evangelical church, like atheists and members of other confessions. That is immoral. Either pay or leave the church if it is not worth it for you to pay.
I'll agree that if you are a member of a church and enjoy church service, you should pay church taxes, too - I'd go even further and say (as an atheist myself) if you're a believer and believe that churches do good things, even if you don't go there often or take advantage of everything that's offered to you, you have an obligation by your very faith to help by paying your share.
Then again, I'm completely stumped as to why the government of a secular country (by constitution!) would ever involve so deeply in clerical matters that it would collect taxes for them, free of charge. That system is so dated and out of place for a modern society, I'm not surprised foreigners are very much irritated by it.
Another issue is that you have to pay to opt out of being a member obliged to pay the tax. This is not about the amount (~10-60€), but the fact that all children of christian parents end up being church members before they're even old enough to decide for themselves, thus having to pay the tax or pay to opt out. The same applies to foreigners unaware of this.
If churches had no tax to rely on, maybe they'd be more engaged to not continually loose members...
I agree with all you said. A similar system is in place where I live but the best argument I’ve heard in favour of keeping it is simply this:
If you take the relatively small state funding away and make the churches seek members to fund themselves, then be prepared that they will go and do just that. We might get American style megachurches with everything that comes with them, real fast.
I realise it is an argument based on fear, but oh do I fear it.
I'm up for this - Europe needs mega-churches! There are about forty churches near me...they take turns in rotating the congregations around, so (for example) i get fucked by the traffic every eight weeks, in a five week loop, depending on the particular church.
One giant church, also televised or streamed, would be fuckin' A.
On the other hand, looking atvthe German modrl, would i have to pay to opt out of the streaming service?
> Then again, I'm completely stumped as to why the government of a secular country (by constitution!) would ever involve so deeply in clerical matters that it would collect taxes for them, free of charge.
This topic has its history. Agree it's outdated, but at least the state gets paid for the service of collecting membership from church member.
> That system is so dated and out of place for a modern society, I'm not surprised foreigners are very much irritated by it.
Foreigners and their unawareness or awareness of anything are not a group important enough for any state to consider their legislation.
> Another issue is that you have to pay to opt out of being a member obliged to pay the tax. This is not about the amount (~10-60€), but the fact that all children of christian parents end up being church members before they're even old enough to decide for themselves, thus having to pay the tax or pay to opt out.
But it is an opt-in, although outdated. First, your parents sign you up. Then, during the confirmation, you decide you want to keep your membership. I said outdated here because historically, confirmation was an entry point to adulthood, and it was considered that they were grown up to accept or reject church membership. It's only a modern-day habit and regulation that we consider 18 years old as adults.
Anyways, people usually know they are baptised and that they will have to pay church tax. Many enjoy 18 years of trial membership for free before they cancel the subscription, or let it continue, depending on their personal preference.
> The same applies to foreigners unaware of this.
Like in any other country, foreigners are expected to get themselves familiar with local laws before moving to a country. Latest after first pay cheque, they are aware they are paying church fee.
What I see about some foreigners is they complain they have to pay church tax, but don't want to leave the church because of "reasons". Well, sorry, guys, at least one third of Germans did exactly that, left the church, partially because they would rather not pay. If your church membership is worth it to you, just pay and shut up, if it's not, cancel it. If you want that other pay for your church membership, go to other country where churches get tax money from everyone. I also don't complain that I can't get Amazon Prime free of charge.
> If churches had no tax to rely on, maybe they'd be more engaged to not continually loose members...
I'm fine with them having to struggle to provide a better service. Also fine with them losing members.
Why doesn't the government tax churches themselves instead of taxing the members? That way they wouldn't have to collect information on the members' religion.
Besides, not every person who is religious even goes to church.. and even if they go, they don't necessarily go every day or even every year of their life. So it makes no sense to tax them unless you could monitor when they go to church.
Churches, however, could be taxed on their revenue, which does not invade the privacy of their members.
No, no, you see: This is not about drawing in taxes from the churches via their members. This is about collecting taxes for the churches, as a service! It's very convenient for them: Don't do anything and get your member fees delivered to your bank account, for free, every month :-)
For historical reasons. The churches used to be much more politically active in the deep past and collected their dues directly. There also wasn’t any sort of safety net provided by the lords of the land, but churches provides some. This has evolved to a system where the church largely stays out of politics and has no direct or official influence, but gets money from the state. This is also helpful for the state to influence the church, for example like with the acceptance of gay marriage.
Precisely this. The beautiful buildings in the Vatican are maintained with Bayern money.
The German Catholic church needs to be careful not to drive away their tithes with a hateful message. Catholicism in Germany is like a gym membership: nobody shows up but they forget to cancel and keep paying.
I don't participate in any Church related activities anymore, and have not used any of their services (hospitals, schools, etc.). I have costed the Church in Germany 0€, and yet I have paid several thousand.
My creed should not earn me a financial penalty. Specially since they don't tell you about the consequences beforehand.
Religion is too powerful a means of control for states not to involve themselves. Just look at the US - fifty years of secular, progressive law is being toppled like a chain dominoes for the sake of Christian jurisprudence, in what is supposed to be a nation with a separation between church and state.
> the idea that only the data that needs to be collected for a certain purpose should be collected.
The US has a similar stature, the Paperwork Reduction Act, a "law governing how federal agencies collect information from the American public", with the aim being to "not overwhelm [the public] with unnecessary or duplicative requests for information" and that the data collected be "a good fit for its proposed use" and further still "To respect privacy, we avoid asking for personal information that’s not relevant or necessary."
https://pra.digital.gov/about/
In practice, of course, this is all bullshit and any data that the government cares to collect is rationalized as fitting all those requirements.
So I'm curious if the German Datensprsamkeit is actually effective?
Well... I suspect German Datensparsamkeit is only a figment of the utterly ridiculous digital infrastructure of the german governments, both federal and state ones. Most processes are still carried out via paper or fax (fax!), you have to show up personally for the most insignificant things, every single village has their own records (practically never digital), and every time the government attempts to make a stab towards more digitalisation, big corps waste billions on giant projects that never get finished - we had the attempt to get health insurance (mandatory here) cards with an NFC chip on them that would securely store medical records and grant online access to your data; finally, no more carrying X-Ray CDs from MD to MD or filling out registration forms at the doc. But of course, 10 years later, everyone has a new card, but you can't do anything with it. Someone has earned a lot with it though.
So, all in all, it's not that Germany's government is so privacy conscious, but we're simply stuck in a pre-digital world with no reasonable way to share data.
In my (university IT) circles it is definitely part of the lived culture. IT sees itself as the ally of the users and not a data collector for the management. The management mostly agrees with the principle of data scarcity as well.
I recall one instance where the highest person at a university tried to get all the user's contact tracing data because of some incident (theft), IT explained that their request was not only illegal, but also useless, because the way data was stored would not allow to extract data without going to another official place and requesting the other half of the data which could only be accessed by the health department.
There is a german saying that goes a bit like: "where there is a feeding trough there are pigs". The idea of data scarcity is to avoid putting up things that can be used as food by pigs. So instead of defending data silos, you build them in a way that they don't become targets in the first place because they are of limited use outside of the intended use case.
Judging by the number of politicians complaining about data privacy, it works.
> The idea comes from Germany's Nazi past, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands where religion was a field in the official documents, which lead to an very efficient genocide.
I am very afraid that a similar thing could happen in the modern world.
The Great Surveillance Machine is just a ticking time-bomb, waiting for the right tyrant to use it to enforce their own idea of Good. Whatever characteristic they want to cleanse out of society, they can easily track down people with that characteristic, and neutralize them. And when that happens, there will be nothing we can do to save ourselves, because we have already surrendered our whole lives to The Machine.
The idea is: Data that just isn't there cannot be lost, abused or stolen. Or phrased differently: Data is also a liability for you and your users and you should balance this liability with the use it has for you.
The idea comes from Germany's Nazi past, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands where religion was a field in the official documents, which lead to an very efficient genocide.