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Comment by michelledepeil | Hacker News Reader

The ELI5 I always tend to fall back on is the example of the Dutch Jewry. The tale goes that The Netherlands had a beautiful list of all its citizens, their names, addresses and their religious statusses neatly tucked away in a locked filing cabinet behind a locked door in the town hall.

Come 1940 the Nazis had a beautiful "leaked database" to use as a reference.

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... And in 1942, the US had the 1940 census that enabled sending citizens of Japanese ancestry to camps.

Today they'd use 23andme, and only your relatives have to sign up for them to get you.

I'm reminded of a recent article about a criminal being caught because his brother had used 23andme.

well nowadays we have better tech for that. you can simply "infer" someone's preferences/values according to their social graph/spending graph(and trivially)

This is easily obtainable information for any regulatory type oversight government level agency(DEA/ICE in the US) if the appropriate presidential order goes through

I'm not sure a five years old child would even understand what or who a Jew is, or where Netherlands is (the ELI5 meme needs to die a fiery death), but otherwise, a very good example.

Example of what? Is everything Nazis used supposed to be banned? Weapons, food, water, computers, trains?

Doesn’t seem like “Nazis used it, therefore it’s bad” is a valid argument. I agree that the government having a list of personal preferences for no reason is bad, but census data is useful for other reasons, and not having it isn’t going to stop other committed groups of people from doing bad things.

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