The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...> (PDF)
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.
Another Edwin Black IBM and the Holocaust link:
There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.
What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.