Comment by _heimdall
3 months ago
That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future.
Its worth remembering how the Nazis so efficiently found Jews in the Netherlands. The Dutch government kept meticulous records, including things like your name, address, and religious affiliation. That wasn't a big deal until the Nazis rolled in, throw in some level of Nazi sympathizers in the Dutch government and it wasn't hard for them to track down anyone they wanted to find.
That's an argument against any mass collection/concentration of data in anyone's hands. Not against gov. collection of data in particular.
Sure, there's a good reason to avoid centralizing data in general but in this case we're talking about governments. Governments are particularly dangerous for mass data collection because they also come with the authority, and military, of a state.
And with the money (or else: the authority) to get the data from private businesses. So they get the full data without any restrictions that they themselves would face.
Based on your other comments, I’m curious what your solution is?
The government needs our records to collect taxes. So at the minimum the government must have some information. We can argue over the mechanism and trust factor but that’s not the core issue here.
The private companies doing this is the core problem. This is a service that the government could provide for free with the most safeguards.
Or perhaps you have some other proposal? And I’m not interested in the no government anarchy you propose elsewhere.
> That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future.
Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway, at least government supposed to have some accountability before the citizens, corporations have much higher incentives for profit.
Why is it a given that we need to trust an entity with our data? Most of human history got by without data collection, centralized or otherwise, there's no innate law of nature requiring it
It doesn't require only trusting the government (or another corporation) today, it requires trusting all future iterations of them as well. It may be a different story if the data was periodically purged, say after each administration for example.
> Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway
Why?
Because the government needs to know who you are to do anything involving you. Taxes, drivers' licenses, passports, courts, etc.
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Does it? We can live without anyone knowing our age except the entities we tell it to.
Is it actually a crime to upload a fake ID photo to a private company for age verification?