[abdullahkhalids]

I don't see any example in the article, in which some bad action by the Ugandan government could only have been done due to the existence of the national ID card.

The core problem is digitization. Once you have people's activity in digital form, it only takes a couple of dozen bits to super uniquely identify every person in the country. ID cards just formalize that.

[viraptor]

On the other hand, have you ever tried to do something even slightly unusual with paper documentation? It's not just convenient to have it digitised, it's close to necessary unless you want to spend months of your life chasing (for example) the right way to translate and certify the validity of an entry of your change of name in an old printed volume of The Gazette in the UK. Because they had a "YOLO, just let the solicitor know you changed your name, or not, who cares" system.

[username332211]

I'm not sure this has as much to do with paper documentation as with the fact the UK has no unique identifier for it's citizens. In that situation, name changes should be a pain.

Just as much as it's a pain to deal with any other database without primary keys.

[ljf]

Indeed - people sometimes think that the National Insurance number is our identifier - but the forget you can use many names with that, and people get by just fine.

My mother is an actress and holds bank accounts (and gets paid) in her full name, her acting name and in her maiden name - I don't think the NI knows about these names any more than they know that she's paying tax to that NI number. Employers don't care as long as you provide an NI - there is not check to make sure it is the 'right name'.

They write to her at her 'full name' but she's able to live (entirely legally) as her other names too.

[surfingdino]

Digitisation is also problematic from the pint of view of tampering with data. It was more difficult to falsify or destroy evidence when it was mostly physical, it is trivial to do it when you are dealing with 1s and 0s.

[Muromec]

This is not how government databases work. Government is optimized to produce as much papertrail as possible in a lot of different places, including actual paper in a huge journal, listing the entries in the order of their acceptance.

Database is just the cache of current state of things for convenience, but all the events that contributed into reaching this final state are also recorded somewhere multiple times and those pieces of trail capture a lot of duplicate information regarding the previous state of system.

Government itself (as big G) doesn't tamper with data really. There is no point to tamper with data if you can control the rules to reach the final state and can legitimately feed events into it. Individual employees do tamper with data all the time and eventually get caught if somebody else cares enough to point it out and dig enough papertrail to make a point.