alt Hacker News> they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
The Stasi were low-tech card catalogs and blackmail.
The Nazis used IBM, and digitized census data that had already been collected and was just there to be used.* Places without extensive census data are where Jews survived. Plenty of people didn't even know they were "Jewish" until the Nazis told them.
It absolutely maps to GDPR. I bet that if you pulled a few good sources of private data, you could map every single e.g. homosexual in the US, with few false positives or negatives. This could still happen if we passed a privacy law tomorrow, and only used data collected until today.
The odds are very much non-zero that this will happen. It should be illegal to collect and trade in massive collections of dossiers on US citizens. The government can just buy them. Weird how we could see it as bad when it was anti-Chinese propaganda about "social credit," but Americans don't know that it's illegal in just about every country in the world to collect and make decisions based on dragnet "credit ratings" like we do here.
The problem with GDPR is that Europeans don't control anything; and they don't really make rights, they make guidelines that they call "rights" but that they can break whenever they want or whenever they want to buy American. GDPR is just a restraint on Europeans, nobody else has to care, and European companies and governments can just buy the info they want about their own populations from Americans who will be happy to sell it to them.