This seems like a very easy problem. The government has birth records, passports, ssn, phone records, etc. so they could provide an age bracket to anybody that needs it. But instead a private corporation will get to do this and create an absolute mess à la Palantir.
That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future.
Its worth remembering how the Nazis so efficiently found Jews in the Netherlands. The Dutch government kept meticulous records, including things like your name, address, and religious affiliation. That wasn't a big deal until the Nazis rolled in, throw in some level of Nazi sympathizers in the Dutch government and it wasn't hard for them to track down anyone they wanted to find.
Sure, there's a good reason to avoid centralizing data in general but in this case we're talking about governments. Governments are particularly dangerous for mass data collection because they also come with the authority, and military, of a state.
And with the money (or else: the authority) to get the data from private businesses. So they get the full data without any restrictions that they themselves would face.
Based on your other comments, I’m curious what your solution is?
The government needs our records to collect taxes. So at the minimum the government must have some information. We can argue over the mechanism and trust factor but that’s not the core issue here.
The private companies doing this is the core problem. This is a service that the government could provide for free with the most safeguards.
Or perhaps you have some other proposal? And I’m not interested in the no government anarchy you propose elsewhere.
> That requires a high level of trust in your current government and whomever is in charge in the future.
Some entity has to be trusted with our data anyway, at least government supposed to have some accountability before the citizens, corporations have much higher incentives for profit.
Why is it a given that we need to trust an entity with our data? Most of human history got by without data collection, centralized or otherwise, there's no innate law of nature requiring it
It doesn't require only trusting the government (or another corporation) today, it requires trusting all future iterations of them as well. It may be a different story if the data was periodically purged, say after each administration for example.
There are still a lot of underlying assumptions here worth noting though. You're assuming we must have a government and what it must be able to do, like charge me taxes or gatekeep certain activities behind licensing systems.
I'm not arguing we don't need a government. But to silently take for granted that everything from income taxes to public roads and travel restrictions are a given jumps ahead here.
We could decide, for example, that the government shouldn't be allowed to centralize certain data and remove some of what we expect them to do instead.
> We could decide, for example, that the government shouldn't be allowed to centralize certain data and remove some of what we expect them to do instead.
How exactly government manages our data is a valid concern and in the modern world this needs to be reevaluated.
