Dissemination of information

Individuals need their personal information, as created on them by their states, to be transmittable to third parties at their will, with the intermediation of their state granting validity to the transmission. Trust in human transactions is tacitly or explicitly provided by the state through validation (or even direct transmission) of the personal information concerned. Any contract between individuals implies that these individuals exist within a state. Sometimes state-issued unique identifiers (e.g., identity card or passport numbers, tax numbers, etc.) are needed too. Unless personal information is authoritatively transmitted by the state, any transaction among individuals is impossible. It is not, therefore, simply a matter of contract execution, but of the existence of contracts at all. This transmission is formal, at an individual’s request. In this way it differs from the tacit, implied transmission seen in Chapter 7, that John is actually John and Mary is Mary. The latter is implied in any human communication and makes states natural to humans. The former is a processing operation, invoked each time by the citizens concerned. It may simply involve transmission of name and citizenship (for the simplest of transactions), but it usually goes far beyond this, to include any and all subsequently enriched personal information of the individual concerned (family status, health, education, employment etc.).

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