'Don't have to carry them'..............................yet.
Of course, it is creeping legislation. Tell them they don't need to carry them and they acquiesce. Then change the law. Standard management technique is to ask for something outrageous, then back off and get the subject to accept something less outrageous but more than they would have done in the first place.
Maxbert,
Luxembourg has far, FAR more info about me on file than the UK does, including tax information, details about my children, medical info, etc...
Indeed, but that information is generally static in nature. Governments have always known the political affiliations, family history, etc of its people. Even before the fountain pen was invented. The difference here is that the information can and ultimately will be correlated to real-time activities. This is dangerous, because it means that people who are currently tolerated(in the loosest sense of the word) can be retrospectively deemed undesirable by the the State. It isn't about that fact that you do no wrong and have done no wrong, it is about the definition of 'wrong' in the future.
At some point, even given data-mining tools and whatnot, there will be just so much information that there will not be enough people or time to analyse it all- We will be just as anonymous within an ocean of information as within a desert of information.
Yes and no. We can imagine that the requirements for such a system were sold and built on a naive notion of the types of queries that will be posed. But as always the intended use of the system will change once it is online as said experience increases and further changes are applied. Basically, it may be crap for its intended naive purpose initially but the strategy and function will change over time in unpredictable ways.
Also, clearly with such vast and obviously complex relationships between the data, expect significant errors in the entry and capture of the data and queries to drag up and warrant investigation into bemused and confused ordinary members of the public.