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Comment by kasperni | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, outside of banking the U.K. is a 3rd world country digital service wise. A lot of countries in the EU have had digital identies for more than 15 years. The U.K hasn't even started.

You want to signup for a digital service from the government, your bank, your insurance company,.. . Well you need to send in a copy of a bill and your passport. And then they will give you a separate login for every service. And it is not even like there are many services you can use.

In Denmark, for example, all communication with the government has been digital for almost 10 years, unless you are exempt. In the U.K. I've experienced places where I had to send in a physical letter.

So yeah, banking is fine, but that is about it. In other places they are at least 10 years behind similar countries.

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I really did not need to send a copy of a bill or passport to sign up with gov.uk. The Revolut app was happy with an emailed photo of my passport and a selfie taken from the app itself. Local banks all have their own apps. Store loyalty cards are mostly also apps, and you can ID them from a device with RFID.

And so on.

I find the EU and UK more or less on the same level for digital services. The UK is a little behind in some ways and a little ahead in others.

The US seems to specialise in making everything unnecessarily difficult. If I want an EIN and I don't already have an ITIN, it's a letter or a fax, and it takes months. If I want an ITIN it's an officially notarised copy of my ID documents - which usually requires a trip to an embassy - and a letter. And again it takes months.

If I want to set up an LLC I have to wade through the details of 50 states, all of whom have different prices, rules, filing requirements, and local tax rates, and hire a local agent, all of whom have different prices, rules, and filing requirements.

And then the IRS can fine me $25k per infringement if they think there's a mistake on my annual filing, even though I won't be paying tax on an LLC passthrough.

Except I will because if it's a passthrough I'll probably be hit with a personal withholding tax, unless I fill in the paperwork that proves there's a tax treaty which reduces it to zero.

If some tax has already paid I can probably claim it back but I'll get a paper cheque which my bank will look at and think "Huh? Why?"

On the upside if I was living in the US I'd have to worry about incredibly expensive health insurance and payroll taxes which would make starting a small business either non-viable or very risky.

And so on. Business friendly? No.

Wait...did you say "fax"? In 2022?

This isn't due to a lack of innovation though - it's because the UK electorate rejected a national identity register a few years back.

Without a national ID system it's much harder to create corresponding e-identity tools.

Edit: I'd said "explicitly rejected" but that would incorrectly imply a referendum or somesuch so I amended.

There's nominal UK resistance to ID cards because the right-wing fascist papers say there is. I'm not convinced the population is all that bothered.

Most people have some form of ID anyway.

Most of Europe has ID cards and they Just Work. They even work as travel ID instead of a passport for flights between European destinations.

  >There's nominal UK resistance to ID cards because the right-wing fascist papers say there is. I'm not convinced the population is all that bothered...

I think you've got it the wrong way round. People who oppose a national ID card tend to be left-leaning, while those who are for it tend to be on the right.

In the UK there's a very strong cultural association [countless films, TV dramas] etc. equating national ID cards with humourless totalitarian officials demanding to see 'Your papers!'. Hence the inherent distaste for the concept of having to carry something that proves who you are to any officious git in a uniform, who cares to ask for it.

Of course the irony is that, outside of passports, the UK pretty much has acquired a de facto national ID card by stealth, in the form of the photocard driving licence.

It's almost always the 'other' document you can use whenever reuired to prove your identity, if you don't have a passport. And the government is trying very hard to get people still holding the older [non photo] paper driving licences to 'upgrade' to a new photocard driving licence. Not only by extolling its benefits, but by threatening heavy fines for anyone whose details have changed in any way on their old paper licence and who hasn't immediately updated it.

Yeah, this 100%. There's a genuine fear of government overreach/control here in the UK, and references to works like 1984 abound. That's not really a partisan thing either, you'd probably get very few people openly support the ID of a government ID card/ID system in general.

Maybe it's a trust thing. Countries where the government has made many of the right decisions and where people trust them (like Nordic and some other European countries) seem to be okay with the national ID thing, whereas companies where people fear (maybe rightly) the government screwing them over (like the UK and US) do not.

I don't think that's relevant to the point - you can't easily reproduce a nordics style e-identity system if you don't have a pre-existing national ID system.

> You want to signup for a digital service from the government, your bank, your insurance company,.. . Well you need to send in a copy of a bill and your passport.

This isn't generally the case; for the most part, a UK resident just answers some questions on application and won't be asked for ID to take out financial products. It's only normally if you fail to verify that you'd be asked that, which might happen if you've got no address/financial history here for e.g.

For online government services all tax/benefits are online and pretty seamless. The things that aren't seamless are much less common - for e.g. renewing driving license I remember being quite painful.

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