Japanese Government Workers Wary of My Number Cards as ID | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Government Workers Wary of My Number Cards as ID

the-japan-news.com

52 pointsjamesknelson33 comments

> “There should be no worries about personal information being leaked,”

This always makes me more worried about personal information being leaked, as it implies they haven't considered the possibility carefully enough.

That's what you get when you leave the government deal with everything regarding one's life. This is a sad trend.

" The government plans to provide special holders for the cards that would hide sensitive information, leaving only the person’s face and name visible. " The article implies that the there are no worries about info leaks because of the special card carrier that obscures personal details.

Foreigners have had to carry "residence cards" (formerly alien registration cards) which are basically these for years.

Having said that, the My Number system is bullshit and will hurt the economy because it will hit people who spend the most money (working cash jobs, side business at home...) disproportionately.

How much does it cost?

It seems like the foreigner residence cards are only superficially similar. For example, the ID number on the residence card is not a permanent identifier over your lifetime (your number will change when you renew your card). In general, that number is also not directly connected to many other things, not in the way that the government is planning for the My Number system.

Seems strikingly similar the US Real ID Act.

The question simply becomes one of, do we truly need a card to identify ourselves to any government or private agency? Currently many places require multiple proofs, so how hard is it to fake/corrupt a singular one? Honestly how is a chip going to protect from someone stealing your card and using before you can alert authorities? Are they PIN protected?

How is this different from practically every kind of ID card? Don't they all usually have

1. Your name

2. Your picture

3. Your date and place of birth

4. Date and place of issue

5. Validity date

6. Some sort of number or alphanumeric code unique to your card

7. Anti-forgery measures like holograms etc.

You shouldn't leave something like that dangling from your neck, of course.

I assume there is resistance against it because it wasn't mandatory to have one before (in my country carrying an ID became mandatory in 2005 and there was quite some resistance). Furthermore there is some privacy/security risk because these cards seem to have a (RFID/NFC or similar) chip on it.

Many countries have some sort of photo id's, think of driving licenses. What's odd here is that they have to wear it in plain sight and use it all the time. A company badge is a credential valid only within the company, this is valid across the country for all kind of purposes. I won't feel comfortable using my passport to open doors. It's disproportionate to the importance of the credential. There are years I don't use my passport at all.

Most of the controversy is because they've never had a mandatory identification number before, and there's always going to be fear and resistance against introducing that kind of thing. I think Japan is a highly privacy-conscientious society, for instance it's still very cash-based.

The less populistic and more informed resistance is, as I see it, based on the fact that the My Number is designed to be a "secret" number you're only supposed to share with the authorities (as in, high risk of identity theft if the number is leaked) similar to the US SSN. But in order to try to increase popularity (and adoption), they're trying moves such as adding a grocery tax-refund scheme, which necessitates showing the ID card with the number prominently printed to minimum wage cashiers, etc. They've tried to placate fears with comments such as "but it's illegal for the cashiers to look at the number" and "you can have a new number issued 3 times!".

I'm from another country with a personal ID number. I find it very handy. But there it's not assumed to be secret (even some online shopping sites will accept it as entry to auto-populate your address from the population register), so there's some extra e.g. ID checks when you use it, lowering the risk of identity theft.

Population register? That sounds like a database I'd like to query millions of times. Which country are you from?

Sweden, I assume. The personnummer (personal number) consists of the following:

- The birth date, e.g. 640823 (YYMMDD)

- The birth number, three digits. Last digit is odd for men and even for women.

- A check digit, calculated by the Luhn algorithm.

A full example: 640823-3234 -- a male born on August 23, 1964.

Or Norway. Very similar except five digits after the birthdate. But no id card here; although my driving license is a de facto id card.

Assuming this is Sweden, the full database is not generally handed out, although you can call the government agency and ask them to do individual queries (e.g. if you are trying to find someone but only know their name and not their address).

However, the database can be given out in full under certain circumstances. In particular, companies which do credit checks are given realtime access to it. In maybe an unanticipated turn of events, one of the the credit check companies (Bisnode AB) then decided to sell access to it more generally, so nowadays it's fairly widely available to companies. In particular, there are a bunch of websites (hitta.se , birthday.se, ...) which let's you cross-reference name, address, and date of birth for anybody.

> ... similar to the US SSN

That ship sailed a long time ago.

My US passport lists my place of birth but not where it was issued (unless you mean "the US"). My drivers license lists my DOB but not my birthplace.

All US passports are issued by the us department of state, which is what you put in the "where was the passport issued" field of a visa application. A bit confusing.

US passports used to have a place of issue. The current ones don't seem to any longer.

Yeah, the "authority" for my old was the "Charleston Passport Center," the authority for my new one is the "United States Department of State."

That's what I was on about. My fault for being so terse

Giving bureaucracy the benefit of the doubt :-) there may have once been a reason to know which office some paperwork was filed in a cabinet in. Today, everything is presumably all digitized in a centralized database somewhere even if the clerical work is distributed.

The main difference is that the My Number system is basically the equivalent of a U.S. Social Security Number, in the sense that the number will be potentially integrated with things like taxes, pension, bank accounts, health records, etc. This obviously has some conveniences, but also carries more risk. Naturally, losing your card is much worse than losing a basic ID card.

Also note that the 12-digit My Number sticks with you throughout your life, unlike an ID number that can be changed. So once you obtain someone's number, they have no easy way of invalidating it so that you can't use it.

A decent test would be to require all government ministers to wear the badges while in the chamber, in particular for all televised sessions.

At least they're practicing "eat your own dog food". Luckily this will get shot down after too many govt workers get impacted, before it reaches the general population.

>“It’s been decided by the government as a whole, so our job is just to go ahead with it,” said an official at the personnel affairs division.

This sentiment makes me feel ill...

You'll find that the Japanese relate to government (and indeed most forms of group dynamics) quite differently from Westerners. I think there's a cultural element you and I are missing, here.

It's not correct to lump all westerners into one group like that. Although this attitude is probably quite foreign to Americans, I see it quite often among Swedes and Danes.

>It's not correct to lump all westerners into one group like that.

You're nitpicking. Sweedes, Danes, Russians and really everybody in the Western hemisphere is miles more individualist than the Japanese.

The irony is that you seem to be mistaking me for an American while having no real counterpoint; the fact remains that we're probably missing a cultural element.

> Russians

Let me doubt this. There are a lot of individualist (esp. in large cities like Moscow and St.Petersburg), but they seem to be somewhat outnumbered by an awfully large number of Russians who consider government as having ultimate authority. I think we can well try to compete with many eastern countries in this regard.

Perhaps, although having Russian family and having spent a few months in Kyoto, my impressions are quite different. To be clear: Russians are much more collectivist than, say, the French. There's no doubt about that.

Either way, this entire thread of conversation remains a pedantic derailment of an original point that still stands.

Not in my experience, but whatevs.

s/government/employer/ and I'm sure there will be millions of Americans having no problem with it.

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