Three countries, three very different levels of proof — and one of them just moved. This pulls the Germany, UK, and Australia findings out of the Splink series into a single map, and holds each to exactly what the documents support: no more, no less.
Germany is where the map just changed. For most of this investigation it was the weakest entry anywhere in the series — a single uncited line on Splink’s own “Used By” page, self-reported, and in the cases I could check, that kind of self-report came back wrong. So I stopped accepting the logo-wall and went to the source.
On 17 August 2026 I filed a Freedom of Information request under the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz with the Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis). Its legal department, the Justiziariat, has formally acknowledged the request, logged it under case number A31_210-26, and confirmed it is in processing, with a substantive answer to follow.
In the method of this series, that must be stated precisely: this does not yet confirm Destatis uses Splink. An acknowledgment is a receipt, not an answer. But it is a cleaner Germany than the old line — a primary-source request is now on the record, and whatever comes back will come from the institution itself, not a maintainer’s logo-wall. The finding stays open; the provenance is Tier 1.
The United Kingdom is the opposite end of the scale — the sharpest, best-documented case anywhere, and the one place the tool has crossed from statistics into operations.
The Ministry of Justice’s own transparency record describes Splink “used in courts to find probation records associated with individuals coming to court… being piloted as part of Core Person Record, a product that aims to create a unique identifier for persons across prisons, probation and the criminal courts… used to find Police National Computer (PNC) numbers associated with individuals.” The Government Digital Service confirms the same tool runs “in both batch and real-time deployments.” That is not counting a population — that is resolving a specific person and acting on them. (High confidence — first-party government documents.)
On the statistical side, the Office for National Statistics linked the 2021 Census to tax and benefits records at near-total scale: “96.7% of census IDs linking to a DWP master key or encrypted National Insurance number.” (High.)
Australia sits just behind the UK on proof, and it is expanding. The Australian Bureau of Statistics states that “for the first time in 2025, the [Person Linkage] Spine was constructed using Splink,” linking Medicare, Centrelink/DOMINO and Personal Income Tax — health, welfare and tax — across the ever-resident population from 2006 to 2025. (High confidence; the only caveat is “ever-resident,” slightly broader than “citizens.”)
Alongside it, the ABS and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare jointly built a National Linkage Spine for the National Disability Data Asset — cross-jurisdictional, person-level (de-identified) profiles of people with disability, “to be shared under new legislation.” (High.)
The pattern is identical in all three, and it is the whole point. Linkage proceeds without consent because the law was written to allow it — public task in the UK, the Census and Statistics Act in Australia, statutory census duty in Germany. The protection is never the individual’s choice; it is statutory confidentiality, de-identification after the join, and the “Five Safes.” None of it is illegal. That is not the gotcha — it is the story: you were not asked, you were not told, there was no way to opt out, and that was the design.
What this map will not claim. Credit scoring and credit bureaus are not substantiated by any source found, and are excluded outright — it is the single line that would discredit everything else. Germany’s Splink usage itself remains, for now, a self-reported entry with an open FOI against it, not a confirmed fact. Flagging exactly what is proven and what is merely asserted is the method, not a footnote to it.
Part of the Splink series: The Quiet Joining-Up · Statistics or Operations? · Who Actually Uses Splink · Ruled Unlawful Next Door.