Isn't it like this in practically every European country? We have ID cards with every one of those fields printed on them, including thumbprints. All of that information is probably in one big table somewhere.
This is a predictable outcome of a government creating then storing long term secrets in a database. Governments are not good at keeping secrets. The data will leak.
Japan is really good in this, they store everything on paper and fax it around.
They’re also starting with a national ID now though.
However are the regional governments supposed to develop their own solutions, or are they using a centrally developed database, just with local unconnected instances?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration#Germany
I was also told something on identity cards only lives on the cards, but cannot find the source or details on that.
edit: Looking it up [0] it looks like there is far more data there, all in a central database since at least 2015 (not sure how it worked before).
[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melderegister#Deutschland
From your link it seems i was not entirely misinformed: "Contrary to popular belief, there is no central administration of resident registration in Germany. The exception is the registration of resident aliens (see Central Register of Foreign Nationals). Registration is organized by 5283 local offices throughout Germany.[18] "
I'm unable to find the part about cards. will edit or reply more if i do find it.
There is something about sharing that information, but I can’t say I understand the legalese ;)
However, there here is a standard API which allows some entities to query all those decentralized registers. It is designed to make it hard to siphon out all data at once (which hopefully trips audit systems in enough places that someone cares to look into).
The only centralized database of that kind is the one at BZSt, which contains far less data. For the moment access is limited to tax-related issues but it will be soon expanded to a centralized base data registry (Registermodernisierung).
It's very likely that this data is also stored in some government database, which I hope will never get breached.