One disadvantage: As a temporary visitor to Sweden, since you don’t have a personnummer, you’re fucked.
Any unusual scenario turns into a nightmare. For instance, I moved abroad during their transition from a codecard to an app, and I lost access to my bank account and all ID-linked services despite warning my bank about the potential problems months ahead of the forced transition. The only way to regain access is to travel back to Denmark and visit my bank or my local council.
These kind of services simply don’t care about the small percentage of tourists and expats that they exclude.
But I think the social externalities in terms of freedom of movement are significant and not priced in.
I’m not a fan of adding regulation but I think this is one of the places where it’s necessary.
And I have to wait 10 years to change my citizenship over too. Now that the extreme-right party won the Dutch elections last week I'd really like to change it.
South Americans can change it over after only 5 years. But not EU citizens strangely.
Maybe EU citizens don’t get an NIE, though? I’m from further away.
However us EU citizens get the scrap of paper thingy. There's no photo on it either, we're supposed to use it alongside our EU photo ID.
The green paper slip is a certificate of registration of EU citizen in Spain, upon which is also marked with their NIE.
On the other hand I also have the Japanese digital ID card (マイナンバーカード), and what a piece of crap. If you ever hear that Japan is the most technologically advanced country in the world: no, it is not.
The more centralized a system is, the more it ossifies. The more people there are to get used to the status quo and incur large costs if anything changes, the more change gets fought. Third parties get their hooks into it, benefit from the status quo and put substantial resources behind preventing changes that are unambiguously improvements -- "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
The only way to avoid it is to never build it to begin with. Or tear it down as soon as possible if you're too late to stop it from existing but not too late to have everyone fighting to preserve their rents if you try to get rid of it.
Can anyone here provide an example document / thing with a valid Spanish ID signature?
However, it is also necessary to make sure data privacy is factored in.
Walking through a park in Shanghai, I discovered that the many vending machines throughout the park will let you specify that you want to pay cash.
You can't actually pay cash, though; the slots that would accept it have been physically removed from the machines. The only way to get something out of one of the vending machines is to send the machine an online payment.
In other digital-payments-in-China news, I just ordered some milk today from the store that is across the street from me. It's no great hardship for me to cross the street and buy the milk myself. However, the price of a third of a gallon of milk is 32 rmb. (USD $4.50). If I order it delivered, a courier will show up, buy the milk, and walk it up four flights of stairs to hand it over to me, and besides paying no delivery fee, my price per carton of milk falls to 22 rmb.
What really bothers me about this is that the bag came with a big receipt stapled to it showing that the delivery service paid the store 26 rmb per carton of milk. So the service was nice enough to cover the courier's fee for me at the same time that they paid me for everything I ordered through them.
Something somewhere is orchestrating a huge forced push for online payment. The economics clearly do not work on their own.
One of the occiasions where a bit of EU regulation wouldn’t hurt.