Comment by cinntaile
2 days ago
I think the advantages of this in a digital age are vastly overblown. If an extremist government comes to power they won't care and they can just do the SQL join. Let it go to court, the extremist government will decide anyway so the outcome is already predetermined.
Compare this to a physical storage of paper documents that need to be SQL joined, the effort required is several magnitudes more.
What it is good for is data breaches, it effectively limits the data that can be leaked at once.
I would not count on those separate databases using a common key. Joining could be quite a pain.
Regardless of the actual implementation, do you agree that it's likely much easier to match data when you have it in an organized digital form than an organized physical form?
Sure it is. One of the reasons, Germany has been shy to introduce a single primary key across all systems.