Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xerophtye 4435 days ago
So each govt body seems to have it's own persona of you. While I understand that this in some way supports privacy against the govt, but it just makes me wonder how they handle certain issues. off the top of my head:

Aren't your passport or driving license connected to your other persona's?

If someone gets arrested, wouldn't that be tied to some existing Primary Key? How else would you know past criminal records of a person?

Do all the bodies simply work on "Foreign Keys" since there is no central Primary Key? And if all records have each other's foreign keys, doesn't that defeat the purpose?

1 comments

It sort of defeats the purpose, but because these are across organisational boundaries, it makes it rather more difficult for anyone to actually do anything with those links, and more expensive. A national ID system leads to a national database where much of this data would be much more accessible to the entire Government.