I don't know about this, stores around me are scanning people's IDs to verify their age.

I guess I could make an ID (not a counterfeit government ID) that uses the same encoding for the birthday.

Not anymore, at least. In these parts your alcohol purchases did require a paper trail once upon a time.

To be fair, I buy my beers on CC. If someone really wanted to know the best IPAs and session able beers they could get, they could audit my CC records and then cross check to the breweries and pubs to see what I was buying. Just depends how much someone wants to learns bout good beer.

And yet in practice they do.

Well, not every beer but when you shop at Beers-R-Us they know.