The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

But once you adjust to it for a second, it's quite nice. My personnummer is public info, and that's fine. With just that number alone, you can't do jack shit. Everywhere it's used online requires you to confirm/sign an action with BankID, or requires a valid ID and physical presence IRL. That's not to say it's impossible to social engineer your way into getting a BankID issued to you for your victim, but it's on the level of "getting someone's social security number" in other countries hard. Any site using BankID for auth doesn't get access to the cert so they can't leak it, and you can revoke your BankID for individual authenticators (like your phone) which you can't do with an SSN.

The US system could be fixed much more efficiently by putting the burden of proof on the businesses who made the transaction instead of the individuals whose data got stolen (gave someone a loan who gave you a stolen SSN? better find out who you really gave it to).

Edit: The above might not be entirely accurate, check out the thread below. Some of these lookup sites may reveal the personnummer on registration and possibly payment. I've never tried this so can't confirm for sure, however.

In the US the financial institutions and the credit reporting and collection agencies have used rather insidious language like "stolen identity" to describe the situation where fraud was perpetrated on one of those agencies by an unknown 3rd party who presumably bore the ID credentials of the person in question thereby passing through the institution's identity checks.

The fraud in these cases is not the problem of the institution, it's the problem of the individual. They use that specific language to train everyone into thinking and accepting that it's their individual problem...you know, since someone "stole their identity".

Then, when the giant companies that collect and "securely store and process" the information that is typically used to perform ID verifications get hacked and this data leaks out for 300M+ people... oh well, tiny fine and a bit of bad press for a week. Then it's swept under the rug and the individuals in the society have to live with those consequences.

It's super fucked...and super stupid.

'Merica.

Another upside that wasn't mentioned in the post is that all this legally required information really simplifies a lot of bureaucracy. It could be done without the info being public I guess, but the law requiring that you register your place of residence makes voting and paying taxes really easy. The state already knows what municipality you live in, so you don't need to register to vote yourself and you don't have to figure out what taxes you need to pay (unless you're self-employed).

People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations.

There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.

And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.

I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer.

But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.

If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?

I'm pretty sure my antisocial neighbor would consider robbing me if he knew my net worth.

Yet you don't name one single thing except that "bad things are possible" without it. I'm quite sure bad things are possible with or without everyone's personal data in a public lookup service.

Yes, at least in my country knowing your ID/SSN does nothing. It is crazy that someone could open an account with the number alone.

This is an industry that only really became possible (and socially acceptable) in the last couple decades. Before that, the data may have been public, and isolated criminals would've no doubt used it, but in general there wasn't an entire industry dedicated to exploiting this data at large scale.

My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home, for example, even in 2020, because she'd lived so long in society as it was that she literally couldn't believe that it could end up as it had; and this wasn't due to stupidity. It was actually safe and normal once.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/981486/crime-free-days-s...

I don't know what to make of the database with respect to free speech/expression laws. Although admittedly the article says no one enforces that the data is accurate inside it. That seems reciprocal.

Sweden is not the type of country that I would dare voicing my opinion in. It's simply not worth it.

[0] https://www.hyresgastforeningen.se/

Only way to get salary info is to count backwards from the tax records, which are made public after the coming May.

If you think about it, it didn't used to be very practical to keep your address highly private because so much information came by mail, so you'd end up sharing your address more widely with friends but even acquaintances. Without mobile phones it could be onerous to set up a meeting away from home if there was any likelihood it would need to be rescheduled at the last second. I believe (with no hard evidence) that "swing by my place and we'll go from there" used to be much more common, by necessity. It was routine for personal home addresses to be listed with the name of the occupant in widely distributed phone books. You could opt out of this by the time I was a kid. These days it might be considered doxing for a company to disseminate this information by default!

I do not think we should have to keep those norms forever, of course, but if we are going to start treating addresses as highly privileged maybe we should more intentional and methodical about it. It would mean trying to answer the question of "how do we preserve the public interest in knowing who owns a piece of land in a municipality, particularly when there is a complaint, an environmental concern, a tax policy question that is hard to answer without knowing who owns all the land in an area, etc."

Another good point you make is that SSNs are dangerous not in and of themselves but because of how they can be used. Like you said, they can be cross referenced if overcollected to build tracking profiles. But also, in the U.S., they have been improperly overloaded as an authentication token, so they have been made dangerous by misuse. But ideally we'd have a system where there is little/no danger in having your SSN exposed.

So you can still lookup how much your co-workers earn without them knowing you asked for. But generally people are open with how much they earn, so it's really not an issue.

There are companies that download the entire salary database and sell 'lookups' in their database. This way you can look up anyone you want and no one gets notified of anything.

No. Depends on how you look it up, but you could just send an email (from anonymous account if wanted) to the tax agency asking for someones salary. You get an answer back in a few days without them being notified.

However there is a lowtech way around this. Taxed income is published yearly in a book that resembles an old phonebook, Taxeringskalendern ("the tax calendar"). Freedoom of the press, see?

This book (or the part of the book that covers your region) will be available at your local library in the "reference" section. For most people you take the number from the book and divide by 12 and you have a lower bound of their monthly salary. Unless they are stalking you at the library noone will know. Very useful when going into salary negotiotiations to know aprox what the rest of the team and your boss makes.

Wow this is a surreal comment. More than 65,000 bikes are reported stolen each year in Sweden [0] - but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as a stolen bike is so common that hardly anyone even bothers reporting it.

[0] https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykel...

Than in a country of 10 million

If you don't it doesn't mean you get arrested, thrown in jail. It is just a requirement for a lot of things in the public services to work in general. The social services for example are pretty good at handling, solving issues like these when you are homeless.

It's a blood bio bank, not a DNA database - although the latter can be created from the former, of course. As far as I know it's only been used once by the police to identify a criminal, they used it to confirm the identity of the person who killed the minister of foreign affaris(?) Anna Lind.

The main purpose of the biobank is to detect rare disases in newborns, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newborn_screening

It's not mandatory to take the test on your newborn, and it's possible to request your sample be destroyed.

There has been talk of opening up the samples to police use, but so far it's been decided that the downsides would overweigh the benefits. One of the fears is that opening up the samples for other use would mean fewer infants will be tested (increasing suffering for those who miss an important diagnosis), and some adults will reques their samples be destroyed (reducing the research value of the data set).