Why do government put our names, birthdates, and other records about us on the internet?

Question

I went in Find A Person website and there are so many many details about you guys for public to see.

Then Lawmakers are complaining about Hackers getting inside the bank, stores, and all... to get credit card info.

If they stopped putting all our information on computer and just do the OLD FASHION WAY... such as paper and pen and leave them in the file cabinet or storage...

Anyway... putting our info on the computer system is so stupid.

I can see how easy it is for illegal immigrants to get access

to our SSN and all.

Answer 1

Once I went to this one website and they had all information about everyone including my cat and I said hey everyone come look at this and they did and then we shut down the internet and solved everything and there's a movie coming out about it in september and I'm played by Harold Ramis.

Answer 2

I agree.  

Answer 3

Paper and pen... Okay uh can you imagine how that would be like?

In CA alone we have over 30,000,000+ people so we would have 30,000,000 files. Our government buildings would have to be the sizes of air fields to be able to hold all of those and what if there is a fire? oh well too bad all your info is lost.  

Answer 4

Archivists have been pushing to maintain paper records, since they are still the most lasting records available.  Computer systems are vulnerable to attacks and require specific technology to access, whereas, taking the long view here, properly maintained paper records last a loooong time, don't require special technology to access except knowledge of the language used, and even this knowledge can be deduced by examining and comparing documents.  

With regard to one of the answerers, it's not necessary to "imagine" what it would be like to maintain paper records as opposed to electronic ones.  That's how it was done until pretty recently.  There are probably still some smaller areas that continue to maintain their records in that way, as technological changes don't happen all of a sudden and instantly apply across the board.

Though, with regard to fraud, it was probably much easier to commit fraud when paper records were kept, due to the difficulty of cross-referencing for purposes of verification.

I think paper records are still viable, but there's a need for redundancy, i.e. having verified duplicates stored elsewhere (to deal with the fire possibility).  On the other hand, electronic records are fine as well (though documents/records that ought to be preserved indefinitely should definitely be backed up by paper copies), and the problem you cited could be handled by not making the records available across networks.