There is no person identification number in the 2011 Census
Critics of the census claim that, in the 2011 Census, every person would get a unique person identification number – a procedure declared unconstitutional by the Federal Constitutional Court in its population census judgment of 1983.
The person identification number referred to in the population census judgment of 1983 of the Federal Constitutional Court is a number permanently linked to a person “from the cradle to the grave” and used for all administrative processes and registers. This would mean that a person XY would be stored in the population register with the same number as at the local tax office or with the pension or health insurance institution.
The census has nothing to do with such a person identification number. All data for the census which are received by the statistical offices remain in the safe area of the statistical offices and are neither transmitted to other authorities for administrative purposes nor transferred back to the data suppliers, for example, the residents’ registration offices or the Federal Employment Agency (“one-way” principle).
The census consists of an interaction between various individual surveys and register extracts, which have to be combined within the specially protected areas of the statistical offices. This is done in accordance with the provisions of the 2011 Census Act regarding the matching of names, addresses and date of birth. For the limited period during which the census results are processed, the results once obtained through such combination can be stored in the safe area of the statistical offices, where they can be accessed through internal reference numbers as is common in modern data processing.
The reference numbers applied in the 2011 Census are just a usual means to process statistical data. They are needed only for the technical implementation of the census, they are used only for internal purposes of the statistical offices of the Federation and the Länder and they are not permanently stored. Once data processing has been finished, they will gradually be deleted. This has to be done not later than four years after the census date of 9 May 2011.
What is also important: The questionnaire numbers printed on the census questionnaires have nothing to do with the reference numbers created later in the process of data processing. The questionnaire number is only needed to allocate the distributed and completed questionnaires – once received by the statistical offices – to the respondents. The questionnaire number consists of a sequence of random characters including a check digit. It does not contain any information on the person obliged to provide information.
