I hear you on the overall privacy issues related to age verification with US Corps. My concern with government registries of personal information is related to things like:

- Netherlands, WWII: The Dutch civil registry meticulously recorded religion. It’s a major reason ~75% of Dutch Jews were killed, the highest rate in occupied Western Europe (vs ~25% in France, where records were poorer).

- US, Japanese internment: The Census Bureau provided block-level data on Japanese Americans in 1942 despite confidentiality guarantees; 2007 research showed individual names and addresses were shared too.

- Rwanda, 1994: Belgian colonial administrators had put ethnicity (Hutu/Tutsi) on national ID cards in the 1930s. Sixty years later those cards were the primary tool at genocide checkpoints.

There’s loads more. Europe may be safe now so it feels safe to give government this information. However, as shown in all the instances above, the information was collected for one reason and used for a wholly different reason when times changed.

Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes? It could be Roblox users, HN commenters, people who religiously repost x.com links as xcancel.com ones, anything. Whatever it is, they will have access to all the data on any system we allow them to record. This isn’t even a totally made up hypothetical from far away places, multiple governments in Europe were doing this kind of thing just decades ago. Historically speaking, we are all currently living in an unusually peaceful era, that will likely be temporary for many of us.