Comment by BiteCode_dev
13 days ago
In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.
After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation.
About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed.
This is the highest percentage in Western Europe.
Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands.
As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation.
The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it.
In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage.
And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those.
It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
> In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications.
But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
This implies you can control your name being linked to your social media profile based on whether or not you type it in?
That's not required though. Your friends have already given your name to them by allowing the app access to their contacts.
That's the whole point of this thread, the current setup makes a google account mandatory, with all the terrible consequences on private life that it has.
It should not.
This registry was centralized
Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives.
This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
Thanks for this correction.
>This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.
Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
To do governing properly you want to understand the impact your policies are having, and I general that means more data can give you better answers. In a world where the invasion had not happened yet it was not unreasonable to collect as much as we could and store it in threefold. Things are different now, once bitten twice shy.
Do Americans or Europeans ask any questions with regarding to why the Government wants to pass these anti-privacy laws, or how is it even supposed to reduce "child grooming", etc.?
Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
Your post highlights how shocked people who don't live in a database state can be when they encounter one. In the UK you can expect to be asked your ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, religion and a few other things every time you apply for a job or interact with the state.
Simply not true.
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In those days education and healthcare were provided by the church and the government gave each denomination money for it.
So that is why the government needed to know how many Catholics or Jews there were.
That's the whole idea about this thread: you don't want the power that be to know more than it should.
And the current legal setup mean you would have to own a google account, a terrible private life setup.
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