[clickety_clack]

I hear you on the overall privacy issues related to age verification with US Corps. My concern with government registries of personal information is related to things like:

- Netherlands, WWII: The Dutch civil registry meticulously recorded religion. It’s a major reason ~75% of Dutch Jews were killed, the highest rate in occupied Western Europe (vs ~25% in France, where records were poorer).

- US, Japanese internment: The Census Bureau provided block-level data on Japanese Americans in 1942 despite confidentiality guarantees; 2007 research showed individual names and addresses were shared too.

- Rwanda, 1994: Belgian colonial administrators had put ethnicity (Hutu/Tutsi) on national ID cards in the 1930s. Sixty years later those cards were the primary tool at genocide checkpoints.

There’s loads more. Europe may be safe now so it feels safe to give government this information. However, as shown in all the instances above, the information was collected for one reason and used for a wholly different reason when times changed.

Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes? It could be Roblox users, HN commenters, people who religiously repost x.com links as xcancel.com ones, anything. Whatever it is, they will have access to all the data on any system we allow them to record. This isn’t even a totally made up hypothetical from far away places, multiple governments in Europe were doing this kind of thing just decades ago. Historically speaking, we are all currently living in an unusually peaceful era, that will likely be temporary for many of us.

[iso1631]

> - Netherlands, WWII: The Dutch civil registry meticulously recorded religion. It’s a major reason ~75% of Dutch Jews were killed, the highest rate in occupied Western Europe (vs ~25% in France, where records were poorer).

Records were poorer in France because René Carmille and the French resistance sabotaged the machines. Machines made by a large tech company which was a competitor to IBM.

> Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes?

Absolutely. But I do know who has that data -- big tech, and it's willing to sell it for a nominal price. No doubt that price will be higher for a deaparate government wanting to kill everyone with green eyes, but that just means a higher profit margin for facebook as they mine their shadow profiles.

[blitzar]

Tech bros will be lining up to gifting it along with a golden statue to whichever dictator they wish to carry favour with.

[vladms]

My opinions is that an idiotic government will use whatever data it can find, and we should be more worried that one appears than imagine that because they do not have some data they will not do some idiocy.

I am not for collecting all data without a reason, sometimes probably too much is collected. But idiots can come with any rule if they want just to find someone to blame (I mean, they already use skin color or accent so if in need, they can come up with a rule like "born on a Monday").