Germany does not use a global unique identifier like the social security number in the US. The Germans do not like such global identifier for people because the the Nazis used them and data protection is very important in Germany.
See https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/DE/202...
Is it allowed to use the Steuer-ID for non-government purposes?
The number is only intended to be used by government entities. The law restricts usage to census and communication with government entities (as well as already established tax-related use).
In any case, Germany does not have one, yet Schufa (the German credit scoring agency) still exists and still is able to build profiles on everybody living in Germany. So what's the gain?
Data mining operations like them will be able to perform good-enough matching based on fuzzy data like current and previous address; it just makes it more likely for errors to happen due to non-unique names and incorrectly merged or split credit profiles, and makes legitimate requests for your own data more difficult than necessary.
Creating one that is shared between private instances would require explicit consent by the citizen to every company to use it according to GDPR. Well, of course Schufa requires consent too, which is not truly a decision a citizen can make. If you don't agree I don't think you'd find any bank opening an account. But I do hope there will such a public outcry if anybody tried to start such surveillance again today, it would fail in the beginning. Like Google Streetview did.
I am not convinced the Schufa score data quality is always very good. (Not living there I cannot request my own one, just a feeling.)
That still does not make it "government information". It's a primary key that (currently) may not be used by the industry. But by itself, it does not identify anything or anyone. In that sense, it's even less sensitive than a name; realistically though, if it's widely stored next to the associated name anyway, it's effectively the same as a name in terms of sensitivity.
A credit score is effectively a database shared across the financial industry. As such, it needs some sort of primary key. That can be either be something globally unique, like an SSN or equivalent, or a wonky composite primary key (first_name, last_name, date_of_birth, last_known_address) which will cause lots of false positives and false negatives:
What if you change your name? What if you move? What if there's somebody with the same name born on the same day in the same city? What if the spelling of your city has changed between your birth and your time of requesting a loan/credit card?
You may object to the idea of credit scoring in general, but being ok with credit scoring, yet objecting to the usage of a sane primary key to do it, makes no sense to me.
I don't want to live in such society. Yes, bad things can and have be done before. But making them simpler, cheaper, and more scalable needs to be avoided.
The much more effective solution here is to regulate businesses in when they can request/use somebody's primary key and/or other PII, and to simply not allow it in any case where a pseudonymous identifier or partial information (e.g. only somebody's approximate age rather than their full date of birth) would do just as well.
And Germans arguably aren’t “forgetting their history”, they are just regulating to achieve desired outcomes (no government and corporate privacy invasion; strong authentication where necessary), not mechanisms (no unique identifiers).
Times and technology change, so why uphold an old (interpretation of) law that is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the desired outcome in the present day?
An identifier is issued by the government for legally-specified government uses is government information.
Other identifiers may or may not be, but other identifiers aren’t the issue here.
Overgeneralizing the issue in dispute to obscure relevant context is not productive.
(At the moment I am citizen, but not a resident so I have no Steuer-ID yet. But a) it might become a resident some day again and b) as a citizen I occasionally have interact with various authorities anyway. So on top of being interested what happens in Germany in general it might affect me personally.)
An increasing number of previosly public administrative functions have been privatized. Does that immediately mean that data exchange stops there?
I can't think of a service like the ones on the list that has been privatized. The law as written would not extend to that but who knows what would be enacted in that case.
Anyway, this is all theory so far as they are still in the stage of drawing up a technical architecture.
The Steuerindentifikationsnummer used to be strictly limited to tax purposes. Against original political promises the legislation has been changed 2 years ago, weakening the limitations. I am not familiar with the details.