Well, it depends on what you call "Privacy". See, the Europeans (as a whole) take a completely different attitude towards Government and Private Organizations than Americans do. To many Americans, the Government is the big, bad wolf, trying to take everything from us. In Europe (to a much larger degree) they take the opposite stance. To many EU citizens, they can control the Government and it's policies at the ballot box, but not so the Corporations. That's why the best Privacy regulations regarding Corporations are coming from Europe, and not the US.

I won't say one way is better than the other, but it's telling that almost every major IT Security standard that deals with Privacy (absent NIST of course) takes its guidance from the EU.

Right, in a really, really ideal society, you wouldn't need to keep this kind of thing secret.

I understand salaries are already public in Norway. Why shouldn't they be? Unless you can't justify your earnings, for some reason.

I understand the 'big brother!' response to this kind of thing, I'm also squeamish about it. It does rely on a government that is trustworthy and accountable. But I don't think secrecy, paranoia, etc, is beneficial, compared to more openness.

Governments can only be trusted when any given individual can be trusted. I understand that Norway’s current government is one of the most accountable and transparent in the world so the damage a given individual can do is limited, but that entails trusting all future governments.

Good luck arguing that a government can do good on a mostly American board.

Or people can just ask for help if they need it

The people in society who need help the most often have the least trust in government and don't have the means to understand and navigate programmes that could help them.

How does surveilling them and then coming to them with assistance increase their trust? Seems like it would decrease trust. I mean I distrust a lot of government functions, and would trust them less in that case.

This might be, because the programs are often not helpful. Here in germany I know stories of how asking for help mainly resulted in the children taken away (and cared for badly).

It depends on the area and the people working on it, I also know of good institutions, but I can see, why the so called underclass is sceptical of the common state institutions.

Most help that comes, comes with hard obligations, that mainly keep them down. Give a struggeling person a bunch of paperwork to fill out and he or she will just struggle more. And only once they are down enough, they get a certain label and then they get a more or less competent government helper, putting them totally into dependent state. Most have accepted their state as retarded by then and rarely make it up again.

I remember this one time when I had a hard time making ends meet so I got a housing subsidy which made me be able to afford rent at the time. This was more or less the first 6 months of that year. After that I got a job, and cancelled my subsidy the moment I started my employment. I got "back debt" and had to pay back a substantial amount of the subsidy I've gotten (remember: without it, I wouldn't have made rent routinely). Effectively, while paying back that debt, as a gainfully employed person - I had less money at the end of each month (after paying rent that is) than while on the subsidy (after paying rent).

I did feel kept down at that time.

That's on the government to fix, the solution is definitely not to track everyone in the country to spot who needs help.

Programs like the proposed one would require trust you day is missing though