I am a lucky winner of the random community survey.  What am I required to answer?  They ask too many questions that fall in the category of non of your fucking business.

Beyond your name, address, number of people living in your residence, they don't need to know things like how many toilets you have.

Got one a couple years ago, just filled it out to show the number of people living here. They called constantly for the rest of the info, i finally gave in and answered every question wrong.

Tell them to go pound sand.

I went thru this twice. Last fall and about 3 years ago. I refused to answer the stupid thing and threw all of them in the trash.

They called me. They sent me "scary letters". They stopped by several times to find out why I wasn't filling out the stupid thing.

I was nice to the lady (they hire local people for $10 hr or so) that called and stopped by, but told her I wasn't gonna fill it out. They gave up after a couple of months. Haven't heard from them since.

The survey and the letters say by law, you have to answer the survey truthfully and completely or face fines. No one in the last 15 years that this crap has been sent has ever been fined or prosecuted.

I read somewhere that 40% of the people do not fill the thing out. Stick to your guns. The Census Bureau "lost" 800 laptops several years ago and does not need to know what time I go to work.

Some naysayers here will say, fill it out, no harm will come of it. It'll help your community, blah, blah, blah.

Do what you want, but they will give up.

Thanks, I get agriculture surveys often, I sign them and send them back unanswered.

1.  I think you are required to answer it.   As in they can fine you if you don't.  Their response rates are something like 95 percent.

2.  My Dad's business was in their panel (which means it was repeated year after year) and he had to report pretty confidential financial data, but he did so.  

3.  I am very familiar with how confidentially kept the data is, and based on my knowledge I'd be happy to to answer their questions accurately.  They anonymize their data to the 1 in 100,000 level, in other words if anyone could guess it's you based on your location, other personal data, etc. then the bits of data that would identify you are removed.  It's a major hassle to researchers like me.  

4.  I am hoping to get access to the confidential "microdata" for one of their (Census) surveys soon.   It is a huge hassle, needs approval up and down the line, it's expensive, you have to be a US citizen to get access so our mostly foreign grad students can't go there, and when you get access it is in a clean room, with only their computers which are not networked.  You aren't allowed any electronic devices in the clean room, no cell phones, no email all day, nothing.  And they have one-on-one supervision for researchers using their confidential microdata and they log every single keystroke you make on their clean-room computers.  

5.  I have been using their non-confidential microdata a lot this year, in fact I am working on some tonight.

In summary, help a brotha out and answer the damn survey accurately.  And fuck Obama.