Interesting, in Sweden this kind of data is already public for anyone to view.
There is also several sites that provide this information like a search service and it's perfectly legal:
There is also several sites that provide this information like a search service and it's perfectly legal:
What there isn't is a single central database and if you want to query data you will need to ask different authorities to get it all.
IBM leased them the machines and sold them the punched cards. And then sold them the census data they had collected across Europe during the 1930s.
That seems highly doubtful. How do the EU countries know you're a citizen, then, when you cross the border?
"Unlike common belief there is no central administration — except for foreigners (see Central Register of Foreign Nationals (Germany)) — the resident registration is run by 5283 local offices throughout Germany."
For passports, I'd guess that there is a different database.
OK, so that makes sense. So at the national level, they only have your Meldeort (place of registration), as it appears on your ID card -- but not (in theory) your residential address.
They certainly don't look up in a database whether you are a citizen. Such an EU-wide thing simply doesn't exist. Heck, even the entry and exit records are not in a common database. At the moment many borders can't even verify the government signature saved on the chip.
That's the same how other government officials determine your German citizenship in most circumstances. Only very few people go through the process of getting definitive proof of their citizenship (Staatsangehörigenausweis) in any point of their life as there is simply no reason to. This process takes quite some time, often including looking at some non-digitized paper documents archived somewhere.
OK, "citizen or valid resident / visa holder / having some other legitimate reason to be holding something that looks like an EU identity card", then.
Whichever -- I was just simplifying. But something tells me that something at major border crossings (e.g. hub airports) has to at least authenticate your right-of-entry -- and that your travel document isn't outright fabricated -- at least a significant portion of the time.
Again, as applies strictly to cases of persons attempting to enter the Shengen area, on the basis of possession of an EU identity card, or a similar travel document asserting current legal residency in one of the member countries. I just don't see how they can (effectively) tell whether the document hasn't been forged or revoked, without comparing against a master list.
There is neither an EU-wide database of citizens, nor of permanent residents. They do have a database of most issued short-term Schengen visa nowadays (VIS) but even that took a lot of effort to implement.
And as said, at the moment they can't even verify all electronic signatures in electronic passports but that should be fixed soon.
I'm not even sure how they would create such a database of citizens as even not the German government has a conclusive list of all citizens and I presume it's similar in other member states.
That check for the right-of-entry is done with the presented document alone. Revocations are checked against and while it's possible to forge the documents it's not easy. But yes, there are known cases of people successfully entering with forged documents.
Just wondering. Thanks for the cool info.
On the other hand they know my fingerprints.
In fact, assigning these numbers was complicated by the fact that there is no central registration data base. They started from all the local data bases and then filtered this data to remove duplicates.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steuerliche_Identifikationsnum... (sorry, German only)
Go to e.g. http://www.ratsit.se/, write "Stockholm" under "Var" and hit "Sök" and click on a name for an example.
You won't see the personal identification number ("personnummer") that we use for absolutely everything, however as tednoob mentions you can get access to this by paying for premium access. Or you can call the Swedish Tax Authority. They don't have the right to ask who you are or why you want someone's number.
Here's some select tidbits from the data in English: http://yle.fi/uutiset/who_are_finlands_top_earners/8427787
in other countries they treat SSN's as private, thus they are trusted.
Of course, for things that really matter, you need an ID.
The problem is that the CPR is tied to all sorts of information from you credit card to your patient journal. You only need to get access to one of those things before you have the potential of access to all the other places.
It's that stupidly built.
Even if you only share them with people or merchants that you really, really trust, the sharing increases the risk of a leak.
1. It makes some forms of investigative journalism easier. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about the potential problems of having most of the influential journalists in Sweden living within a very small "hipster" area in Stockholm.
2. E-commerce companies may decide to only ship to the adress where you are officially registered, making it harder to commit e-commerce fraud.
I don't know if they've done this yet but a while ago there were articles about them working on a way to disallow changing your address via the mail form:
In one country giving someone a pair of shoes is seen as a nice present, in another it is considered a grave insult.
What you grow up with as a kid can have a big influence on what you consider acceptable.
In my personal view as long as the rules apply the same to all then that's the largest problem solved.
EDIT: fixed typo
I am not joking when I worked for a Telco they used this scenario to empathize whey you should not do favours for friends and lookup peoples address.