BUT THEY’RE GOOD GERMAN OFFICIALS.  Here’s a quick privacy quiz.  Imagine that data from your unsecured wireless router has been mistakenly collected by a Google Street View car as it trundles down your street.  The company admits that it shouldn’t have done that.  In order to cure the privacy violation, you want Google to:

(a) Destroy your data

(b) Turn all your data over to German government officials

You can learn everything you need to know about the European privacy bureaucracy from the answer to this question.