[c4mpute]

In some cases (taxes mostly) digital data has been associated with government-wide identifiers that make profiling citizens across all government agencies possible and easy. Linking even more data automatically and without asking the affected citizen to those identifiers rightfully gets pushback.

Paper often uses the same identifiers, but being paper, isn't automatically linked to all the other papers in other filing cabinets somewhere...

[BlueTemplar]

Yup, it should not be surprising that the 1978 SAFARI scandal that resulted in the creation of the French data protection authority happened when the government attempted (and had to stop) to link various then paper databases into a centralized one through a single social security number.