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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.

Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.

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To do governing properly you want to understand the impact your policies are having, and I general that means more data can give you better answers. In a world where the invasion had not happened yet it was not unreasonable to collect as much as we could and store it in threefold. Things are different now, once bitten twice shy.

Do Americans or Europeans ask any questions with regarding to why the Government wants to pass these anti-privacy laws, or how is it even supposed to reduce "child grooming", etc.?

Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.

Your post highlights how shocked people who don't live in a database state can be when they encounter one. In the UK you can expect to be asked your ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, religion and a few other things every time you apply for a job or interact with the state.

Simply not true.

I was asked all of the above the last time I applied for a job, and the last time I was admitted to hospital.

In those days education and healthcare were provided by the church and the government gave each denomination money for it.

So that is why the government needed to know how many Catholics or Jews there were.

That's the whole idea about this thread: you don't want the power that be to know more than it should.

And the current legal setup mean you would have to own a google account, a terrible private life setup.

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