What if Russia were to overtake Latvia in the coming months via direct force or through installing a puppet regime? Trump in 2024 for our American counterparts. Would you be okay with the new masters having all this data and history on you?
Europeans have a rich history of bad regimes and their removal. It's not like the puppet regime would be like "Oh no, we can't do anything about this person who tweets nasty things about us because we can't look him up in the central registry". It's going to be like "hey Twitter give us the ip address of this person or you loose your money and access to our market" and then they will phone the ISP and tell them to give the ID and address of the user with that ip address.
So in reality, central registry of information doesn't really protect you from anything but saves the bad actor a few phone calls. On the other hand, it saves you a lot of phone calls and office visits every time you need to deal with the government.
If Russians install a puppet regime, the existence or lack of central registry wont actually change much. It will require popular uprising to make a difference, which Europeans are actually accustomed to.
Riots and protests happen all the time everywhere and taking down the governments is a thing too. Of course it depend on the specific country but in general governments in European countries resign all the time and when the refuse to resign despite popular demand they end up removed by riots.
So they also have bad history of greedy private enterprises on which they don't have a say.
The idea is that there's a value in having an enterprise(the government) with centralised record keeping because they own that government and have the power to change managers on predefined reviews(elections) and they have a history of forcefully changing managers who try to stick around despite not being wanted.
What do you do when a private enterprise misbehaves? Mind you, the governmental duties are often monopolistic by nature. What do you do then? Sniper the CEO?
It's much more socially acceptable to riot against the government and burn government building than assaulting company HQ.
We've also learned from our history, and created institutions like the ECHR to enforce a minimum standard of human rights against the state, and list more things than "Speech and guns good" like the US.
If Russia takes over any country, it's game over anyway like it was after WW2. The lack of an ID won't protect you from rape, robbery, murder, a trip to gulag, etc.
Russia is indeed the main threat in our neck of the woods. And with the regimes they tend to run, lack of easily accessible digital registry is not something that will save you from falling down the stairs and accidentally landing on couple of bullets with the back of your head.
More importantly, we already have these registries! There's already a digital identity verification service in place that, according to our law, is sufficient to identify a person to the same degree an ID card / passport would in person. It's there, I've used it as an end-user, I've set up integrations with it for my clients. The issue is that if I want to identify myself to a German institution for whatever reason, the only way I know of involves burning a whole lot of dead dinosaur juice to get to Berlin, standing in an orderly queue for a while, and presenting my passport in person. And probably filling out couple forms along the way somewhere.
Yeah but do you want this thing linked to every click, like, page view, search, post, purchase and so on? Required for entry, to buy and so on? Very easy for it to go that way. That's the fear behind those who are saying pause.
