Or have to go through great lengths to escape.
In my country you can’t buy any medicine without showing your ID… I mean, you technically can, but if you are registered they “give” like an 80% discount, so everyone thinks it’s a great deal, not realizing that’s the normal price, they are just pretending you can still go and buy a simple cold medicine without sharing your ID, phone, email, and street address with the drug store and whoever they decide to sell that information to, you just have to pay absurdly more. Yeah, you can lie about all the other information, but not really about your ID number. Probably soon, to get the “discount”, you are going to have to verify your email or phone number as well.
That’s quite interesting, did you have other sort of compulsory ID before the national one? Like, what did you use to register to stuff, like enrolling in school or college, opening a bank account or getting a retirement plan, etc.
In my country we have both the state and national ID. I guess very long ago you could use your state ID to register to stuff, but as they pushed for more standardization everything started to require your national ID instead, and your state ID card was more a proof that you are who you claim to be (like, you have to collect a parcel somewhere and show it belongs to you, or if you are stopped by the police you can show your state ID)… but usually people just use the driver’s license because it has both ID numbers and your picture, so it’s a valid document for everything.