This is typical public sector thinking - great being the enemy of good.
The extra information they are after will be very very useful in lots of situations, but they have missed the glaring issue of privacy. It could cause far fewer people to sign up, meaning that it misses what it is meant to do in the first place (apparently you need at least 60% of the population to use it for it to be effective), and we can pretty much guarantee some kind of snafu to allow access to the data for people we don't want to access it.
Most frustrating.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
