EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR
At the time I moved out of New Jersey 8 years ago, the state was still unable to represent my completely vanilla name on my driver's license. My first name is "Christopher", but their computers can't/couldn't handle an 11-character name. It was always truncated on my driver's license.<p>This led to problems when they instituted their trusted ID compliance. When renewing the license we were required to provide some combination of documentation to corroborate our identity, and obviously that documentation needs to match the name shown on the driver's license - and of course mine did not.<p>There was one way out for Christophers like myself. A birth certificate was considered the ultimate truth, so as long as I had a notarized (with the raised seal) birth certificate to prove my identity, they would allow me to renew my license.<p>The State of New Jersey is very awful at IT. My wife, who works in healthcare finance, told me about problems she was having with the State because - get this - their field for what amounts to "Medicaid ID#" was too narrow, so they had to recycle ID#s for new recipients! And to make that worse, they discarded old backup data so when checking the data for a patient several years ago, it's only possible to find that of the latest owner of ID# 12345.