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Comment by Dma54rhs | Hacker News Reader

Very few governments don't store data like that, America and it lack of standardized documentation is an outliner in the developed world.

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Not according to comments on this post. Lots of governments in Europe keep records at the city and state level. Unless they are passports.

The UK isn't technically in Europe any more (except geographically), but there are no city or state (county) level photo IDs here. Everything is national and managed by the central government.

It's in Europe the same way it has always been. UK is no longer in the EU

And even within the EU I’d still wager that there are many different systems in different countries. Almost like it’s a block of diverse individual nations and not just a single entity that you can make lazy comparisons with.

Like which ones? I can't see the comments you're referring to.

Look at johannes1234321 comment below.

Its all centrally forced, the security, the implementation. They are printed the same place, same way, a lot of directives straight from Brussels.

And the passports have photos, right?

Do you have a source for this? I'm curious to see a chart of "centralization of standardized documentation" by country to validate your claims.

Source for what, it's so common knowledge that you should list countries that don't do centralized id besides USA in the developed world. Search for voting id laws is probably a good start.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2019...

These are from 2019,but the documents have always existed. And each country is using this guideline for their countries.

having a givernment issued ID neither means all data is being stored, nor that itnis stored centralized.

In Germany for instance most data is held by the municipality and centralization happens slowly and centralizing pictures is only a recent proposal.

Because it's not necessary. Since 2017 police and secret agencies can access all photos 24/7 per web access.

The centralization proposal the person you are replying to was done because that API access you are talking about apparently hasn't been implemented in a wide spread manner. So now each Bundesland can create their own database.

https://www.golem.de/news/trotz-kritik-smartphone-ausweis-un...

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