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Comment by adamfarhadi | Hacker News Reader

Sweden is a privacy-minded individual’s nightmare. There are a bunch of other sites like Hitta as well. For example on Ratsit you can pay a small amount of money and see anyone’s salary and full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US. If they live in an apartment you can see exactly where in the building they live. Just as an example, when I was visiting a friend for the first time I wasn’t sure where in the building he lived so I put his name into Ratsit and it said “second floor, third door from the left”. It also had his phone number and other information about him as well, including other individuals he lived with and the names of every person in his building.

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Doesn't the EU lean towards privacy protection for individuals? I'm assuming Sweden being a member, means that EU laws would take precedence if someone wanted their information removed from websites like these?

As far as I can tell, the EU tends to lean towards privacy protection for individuals against businesses or other private entities, not against the government, and the focus doesn't always seem to be on governmental datasets being used for private purposes. A lot more governmental data collection is needed to handle things such as mandatory resident registrations in most EU countries, single-payer healthcare in some EU countries, relatively pre-filled tax declarations in some countries, etc.

Not Swedish, but the relevant one in the parent comment is probably mandatory residency registrations, and I'm surprised the data is so publicly accessible there. There are usually attempts at creating firewalls in many countries so the data that one agency collects isn't directly linked to that of other agencies, preventing broad files on individuals.

> full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US

It's similar in the sense that it's a unique number assigned to each person, but the fact that it's publicly available means that it cannot be used as authentication.

And SSN shouldn't be used as authentication either. It's too easy to steal, too hard to change.

We have a similar issue with Finnish Personal Identity Codes, which are legally public, but there are restrictions related to their processing. Which leads to the common misunderstanding that they're secret, so they're used for authentication. It's a mess.

https://hetueiolesalasana.fi/en.html

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