Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

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In Sweden, we have BankID for one thing. You can't do anything at all without it, including (in many cases) buying things online with your Visa or Mastercard. You can't even do stupid things like look up license plates or other simple tasks. You certainly can't deal very well with the medical system without it. In many cases even mail can be a pain in the ass without it.

Then we have another problem. Cashlessness. There are fewer and fewer places that accept cash for payment and even if they do some of them won't have change (since it's so rare that other people are paying in cash).

I have a friend now who was cut off from the BankID (and thus cashless) system and it's quite a struggle for him. He has to constantly have other people (i.e. us) do things for him, or drive 40km to one city or another during specific hours to do things (since all the local outlets for everything closed since 99% of people do 99% of everything online now).

Painful!

How does one get shut out?

Perhaps a story of his life now could be told to whatever politician may make sense? (I just do not know that for your part of the world)

Seems to me there must be some basic government run thing to manage this. Using corporations has too many problems.

And you may tell me BankID is government! Hope not.

He gave a copy of his bank card to his ex-wife who was living in Uganda and using it there. The card was under his name though, which is against their policy. He could have easily gotten a card in her name, but he's extremely irresponsible in general (and doesn't really care what the rules are). They banned him for six months. He hasn't even bothered to figure out if it's automatically re-instated or whether he has to appeal. I don't know how such people live to be 65 years old.

The government isn't requiring BankID except for on their own services (where sometimes other options are provided). It's kind of just the most convenient thing that all agencies and businesses end up using. There's no laws around it, I mean. They all opted into it. It's run by a private consortium of banks.

Oh, not lifetime then. Good. Seems quite reasonable. Thanks for the details.

Does it? It doesn't seem reasonable to me to effectively ban a non-criminal citizen from the economy and from civic life, not even for "just" six months, no matter how "irresponsible" the citizen is.

Perhaps. It is a little hard for me to gage.

The non criminal part in all this does carry serious weight with me, and on that basis I agree more with you.

It is harsh. It does not need to be.

BankID is owned by a cartel of our biggest banks but effectively, in real life, is basically mandatory. It's used with (mostly) everything here and it's hard to get a new one if you let some other things slip, like your passport or national ID card.

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