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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is a huge problem. In fact, when looking into Swedish jobs, you are usually advised to try to get a personnummer ASAP to make your relocation as smooth as possible. Denmark also has similar problems with their digital ID.

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.

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I'm in the same boat, lost my BankID and with it everything it unlocks. I live 20000km from Sweden and can't easily make that trip, especially during the covid travel restrictions. Letters with notarised copies of ID were quickly dismissed by the bank. Hopefully I'll get there next year...

Conversely, when I cross the border into Denmark from Germany, lots of places accept only a danish payment system, to which you can only sign up with DANISH phone number!

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.

an this is why a EU wide system is needed. I hold 3 digital identities (Spain, Italy and Sweden) and, believe me, it's not fun.

I agree, lack of standardization discourages freedom of movement.

However, it is also necessary to make sure data privacy is factored in.

At least your Spanish DNIe contains an X.509 certificate you can access via PKCS#11 that Just Works, both for authentication and signature. You can even use it for SSH!

Can confirm. I just renewed my Spanish DNIe last summer and not only was the whole process super smooth and took only a few minutes, but the certificate works on Linux out of the box! DNIe was crap for many years, but credit where credit is due, it has improved a lot.

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.

Japan was miles ahead in the early 2000s but as some say, being ahead can also be a burden. And as a deeply traditional society they tend to cling to things that work. I heard that even faxes are still used there. In Austria too by the way but that's more because of an obscure legal status thing.

That's not a consequence of being ahead, it's a consequence of enough time passing if you do it at all.

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.

Yeah I wish I could get one as a foreigner. I only get a shitty piece of green paper that doesn't last more than a few months in a wallet.

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.

Didn’t you get an NIE? I had one immediately (so did my whole family), the card wasn’t paper, and it was treated as identical to the Spanish ID. And yes it was super convenient certificates and all. I had to use the certs once and was afraid (due to past experience) but honestly it “just worked”.

Maybe EU citizens don’t get an NIE, though? I’m from further away.

The NIE that non EU foreigners get is indeed plastic, also referred to as a TIE sometimes.

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.

That is a TIE, upon which is marked your NIE. There is no certificate installed in it that I know of, just the "normal" contactless biometric travel document stuff like a passport.

The green paper slip is a certificate of registration of EU citizen in Spain, upon which is also marked with their NIE.

you get the certificate from FNMT, it's not related to EU or non EU AFAIK

You can get a digital certificate, such as the idCAT (the FNMT also issues them). I have mine loaded into a smart card because that's just how I roll, but either way it's equivalent to the DNIe; you can use it to authenticate to all the government agencies.

Can the Spanish ID card be used for code signing (e.g. signed installers for Windows) and for S/MIME?

Can anyone here provide an example document / thing with a valid Spanish ID signature?

Spain invested on a standard infrastructure (client-side certificates) back in the days (early 2000 ?) and I am amazed by how simple, how well it works and how nobody else has thought about doing the same anywhere else (to my knowledge). Well done Spain, at least on this.

Or, it isnt even an identity, just an account. I have one for my pension in France, and theyve been updating their systems and I can no longer enter addresses abroad. So I must leave it blank and never change any personal details because I'll fail the forms checks... I can't prove I'm me because it's just some account.

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