{"id":36952,"date":"2026-03-20T10:41:59","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T14:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lpi.org\/articles\/\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T10:56:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T14:56:38","slug":"what-everybody-knows-about-you-governments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lpi.org\/de\/blog\/2026\/03\/20\/what-everybody-knows-about-you-governments\/","title":{"rendered":"What Everybody Knows About You: Governments"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of a continuing series about data collection today<\/a>. I wanted in the previous articles to demonstrate how pervasive information intrusions are among all kinds of institutions, before turning in this article to governments, where most people focus their attention.<\/p>\n

I’ll start this section with an anecdote dating back to the 1970s. Two friends of mine recorded their upcoming marriage at the Town Hall where they lived, a routine practice everyone undergoes in order to get their union legally recognized. Soon they started receiving solicitations from local department stores to open up wedding registries. The department stores could have learned about their engagement only from the town government. In other words, the local government was enhancing its revenues by exploiting and monetizing information its residents were legally required to furnish.<\/p>\n

I talked earlier about the high-stakes snooping that governments do to uncover enemies, whether they be human rights activists or violent terrorists. But as the marriage story shows, governments also record a lot of mundane information about everyone in the course of their day-to-day operations. The story registry reminds us of the things we have to tell governments about ourselves. A partial list includes:<\/p>\n