Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever).

This is most likely incidental.

As in, to successfully show text messages to people, somewhere at the ISP, someone has to have a database that shows what messages were sent off from which tower and need to be routed where. Maybe they're retained for a while for re-send reasons, too. Yeah.

But the point is, that's not the same reason why your home address is retained at the motor license department.

We humans love to see patterns in things, but we do so even when none exist, as our brains want to desperately simplify information to save space, essentially. But we should not let that fool us into thinking the world is simpler than it actually is: We have a host of reasons to retain data, and this existed long, long, loooong before digital databases. And for good reason. After all, if it cannot be verified that you are you in context X, the state can hardly offer you service Y or protection Z (such as those are in the US in particular, granted).

Your city has to know who you are and where you live. Your motor dep needs to know which license belongs to whom and is attached to which vehicle. Amazon needs to know where to send your parcels. Your phone provider needs to know which phone belongs to which number in their network and where it is right now. Etc, etc, etc. They all do so for individual reasons.