Monday, June 6, 2022

Your Records on Display

 So there's this discussion going on in Germany....about gathering a lot of personal data about people and things.....to house under one single umbrella.  ARD covered this topic yesterday.

You see....Germans collect on dozens of levels....data about people.  And for decades....the data has been separate.  The police could see bits and pieces.....the border police could see bits and pieces, and so on.

So there's this software package out there....called Palantir (commercial company), and it's built to connect to various programs.

Two states in Germany use it (Hessen and NRW).  It's not federally supported.

Cost?  They all avoid discussing this factor.

Privacy people worried?  Yeah, to some degree.

You could imagine it pulling up my record, seeing various travels....ownership of cars....traffic tickets....consumption of electrical power....credit power....cellphone contract....and a hundred-odd factors.  

The odds that some other country would eventually get into the middle of this....without authorization of the German government?  Oh, it might take a year or two....but it would eventually occur (my belief).

People without much of a 'trail'?  I could see a point in five years where a state official looks around and realizes more than a thousand people exist in Hessen....who aren't in the data collection and start asking stupid questions. 

It's best not to ask a lot of questions here on this.....it's going to be a national thing....one way or another.

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