Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

The easiest way to avoid Apple and most of Google seems to be to get a Google Pixel and install GrapheneOS on it. This works for me.

The status quo sucks. Political solutions are probably years off, and likely entail making Apple and Google behave rather than mandate open standards and allow alternatives. We are stuck with this duopoly for now. (At least desktop and laptop computers don't suffer from this.)

Alternative OSes on the smartphone are pointless if participating in digital society is your goal, because your friends and family will all use WhatsApp or something (this varies by country), and your bank will make banking with them harder if you don't use their app. Your government will increasingly rely on you owning a smartphone for digital access. In the Netherlands, digital access to healthcare records now by law requires that you either use the DigiD app on Android or IOS, or that you resort to begging for a paper copy; there will be nothing in between¹. When travelling, the apps for the larger public transport companies will have all the delays, re-routings, e-tickets, and other useful stuff. All of these require one of the two smartphone software stores, Apple's or Google's.

At least with GrapheneOS you can limit the Play Store to that handful of apps you must grudgingly use. The rest can be gotten from the, excellent, FOSS F-Droid store (like OsmAnd~, OpenCamera, and OrganicMaps), so you can minimize having to deal with the noise and chaos of the Play Store.

The Swish-thing sounds totally dystopic by the way. It's just by a quirk of fate that we don't have that trend in the Netherlands, where paying with a debit card is standard and smartphone payment systems basically just use that same system with a digital debit card. The war on cash is being waged here too though.

1: Use of DigiD, the Dutch digital identity system, without the app is not allowed for healthcare records, and existing healthcare systems are required to migrate to this. It is still allowed to login for other purposes like taxes using a password or SMS confirmation — for now.

I am fine with ToS changes which put Apple and Google under highly regulated control similar to how my bank, power, and phone companies are regulated. These regulations must prohibit the use of my information for advertising purposes, for example.

> Alternative OSes on the smartphone are pointless if participating in digital society is your goal,

That is not my goal. My goal is to be able to participate in daily, physical society without having large monopolistic companies outside of strong Swedish or EU regulations be part of my daily life in Sweden.

Swish is only the surface of the dystopia that Sweden is these days. Wait until you find out how Swedish personal numbers (personnummers) work. The government, banks, insurance companies, landlords, etc. can pretty much deny anyone (including Swedish citizens) basic services if they don't have one.

Isn't that basically how social security numbers are in the US? Paying your taxes, opening a bank account, starting an insurance policy, and applying for an apartment all ask for an SSN. This isn't a Sweden thing, it's just a 21st century thing.

Are there Swedish citizens without personal numbers?

Is it the need to identify oneself that you find dystopic?

Yes, there are Swedish citizens without personal numbers. Not only that, but you can only get a personal number if you have been a resident. If you are a Swedish citizen who has never lived in Sweden, you have to move there to get one. Otherwise when you are registered with the tax authority abroad you are only issued a samordningsnummer.

There are not, GP is either a troll or misinformed.

The difference between the Swedish personnummer and similar system in other countries is basically that the Swedish version functions unusually well.

You can actually get a personnummer without being a citizen.

You are misinformed. I personally had to deal with the nightmare of not having a personal number as a Swede born abroad.

I stand corrected, saw your other post about sammordningsnummer, and googled that. It's quite the corner case that I'd never heard of before.

I'll agree that the system is not optimal and could be better in this regard, but it is hardly dystopian. You have about 2 hoops to jump through to get your ID, and after that you'll have full access to one of the most convenient bureaucracies on earth (and that's probably the first time I've used the words convenient and bureaucracy in the same sentence!)

Having lived in a few different countries, and having friends who have migrated from a few others to Sweden, I'm fairly confident the Swedish bureaucracy is ahead of the curve.

If I may ask, where do you live that has a better system? How does it work over there?

In addition they also encode (binary) gender which means they’re terrible for trans people (not to mention nonbinary people more generally) because it means anyone can search databases for trans peope. Just find everyone whose number encodes a gender that does not overlap with their name’s.

You can get it changed, but only after getting a dysphoria diagnosis and a recommendation letter from a doctor and then applying to a specific committee, a process that currently takes more than five years (I don’t know how much more because I’m still waiting).

And then of course it’s an administrative nightmare to get in touch with everyone and tell them you’ve done something that usually is seen as impossible since personnummer are meant to be primary keys in society’s database.

Wow, that's a huge design flaw. Such a number should be opaque (the Dutch BSN is), but Sweden's number just puts the date of birth and gender in the number there for all to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...

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