I think people from other countries don’t understand that Americans don’t want (federal) government knowing anything about them besides taxes. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why, but for the most part it boils down to various forms of liberty - and tales of the mark of the beast.
… but it’s usually fine when your state or a corporation is doing it.
I'm not American, I know that, have heard various reasons for it, and i consider it to be profoundly stupid. It might have made sense in the 19th century, but today? Your federal government already knows all there is to know about you. They can tap in healthcare, financial, state government information, all that online stuff. The cat is out of the bag, why not use it for something practical? A common unified ID which gives access to e-government services is the norm across the EU, and it's pretty cool and practical.
That sounds profoundly stupid. You mean like the credit rating agencies that provide credit worthiness identity, but where you have no control of how and with whom they store your data? So how would that work, how would the companies providing that service make money and how could they prove your identity? They'd still need to use government info like birth certificate/drivers license to verify who you are, but they'd have a profit motive. Of course that sounds better than the government, which doesn't need to sell who you are, providing an identity service.
Why have a useless middleman trying to make money off you?
So fuck any homeless, people living alone, orphans, etc. ? Not to mention the utter unreliability of relying on random people (who claim they know you) for information like place/date of birth, etc.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/....
At the same time they don’t have any issues with commercial companies knowing everything about them, without any kind of control or oversight.