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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Here in Sweden, the use of license plate scanners has become the norm for basically all parking houses, bridge tolls and road tolls. Even if you don't install the app or become a "member" of whatever system they are using, the license plate scanners is still used to detect when you enter or leave, and in some cases they automatically look up your home address to send you the bill with zero interaction with the driver. Even if they offer alternative ways to pay, by for example sms, it still uses the license plate scanner when you leave.

The only political party to even mention this as a problem was the pirate party back 15 years ago, and even then it never became a major issue that got discussed. Like paying with credit cards rather than physical cash, people see it as convenience or just as the way things now work.

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Same is true in Iceland. It’s just the established norm. Much less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier’ed lanes would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment experience to the user’s smartphone. It’s still a bit foreign to visitors from places where this isn’t the norm but for Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.

To be fair, the relationship between the Icelandic people and their government and their corporate class is wildly different vs that in the US in 2025 to say the least.

A month or two after a visit to Iceland (my favorite country by far by the way), I received a ticket in the mail for speeding. It included a picture of the car I rented and a closeup of the driver's face- a face that did not belong to me (presumably another renter).

Luckily, a quick phone call and a copy of my drivers license cleared things up, but systems like these inevitably lead to "guilty until proven innocent" scenarios instead of "innocent until proven guilty".

In the US a lot of the bridge tolls are automated, or became automated during the pandemic. With no going back.

You either have to create and account and register your vehicles by license plate, or you get a toll in the mail that must be paid either by mail or online.

I got behind on a few of these and got fined, I think maybe 5x the price tacked on.

I would love to just pay in cash each time I use an infrequenlty-crossed bridge.

Toll collection in most states used to be a mostly graft operation. They'd make insane salaries for what they did and the jobs would be handed out based on political connections. Basically welfare for the deadbead family members of the politically useful. In my state they had a union and it took forever to get rid of them. When they did get rid of them the tolls basically halved for no change in revenue because that's how much cash was going missing.

Unlike toll roads and parking lot entrances it seems like these cameras are being installed for the sole purpose of surveillance and tracking peoples movements.

Looking for context here: how do Swedes view their government? Do they feel represented by, it, trust their governments etc.?

My perception as a USian in a coastal, progressive state, is that trust in government is quite low. Municipal and county governments do OK, but federal and to some degree state governments seems to have priorities that are wildly divergent from our own.

I'm in Chicagoland (in Oak Park, directly adjacent to the west side of Chicago) and it literally depends on which suburb you're in. Oak Park is hostile to ALPRs. Berwyn, our neighbor to the south, and River Forest, to the west, are carpeted with them. They're there because people want them.

Found this amazing redlining map. I think I've highlighted Berwyn. I don't have knowledge to contextualize the map but I'm curious if any patterns from the HOLC map are strongly present in your area now.

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/IL/Chicago/a...

You don't want to get me started on this.

places soapbox

I can’t speak to Swedes, but as an American Norwegian, I can say that the level of trust in Scandinavian is WAY higher than in the US. It’s not utopia, of course, (see Chat Control, for instance) but you really can trust the government here to take care of things when it goes off the rails for whatever reason.

First actual swede to reply here it seems!

It's not a very simple question to answer, but I'll do my best. In general terms, most Swedes trust the government and all government agencies to do their job in a fair and just way, barring the occasional case of incompetence. When a Swede say they don't trust the government, in my experience, they typically mean that they disagree with the current government on matters of policy, not that they suspect it of corruption.

I myself don't trust the current government, in that I think they will likely make the wrong decisions on important matters, I think they have the wrong priorities, and their argumentation is often insincere. I do not, however, suspect them of anything more nefarious than engaging in right-wing populism(by Swedish standards, our default is considerably further left than America's)

A coup attempt by a government official in Sweden, such as we have seen in the USA and Brazil among other places recently, seems to me about as likely as our current prime minister turning out to be a literal lizard-man.

Do note that I'm speaking rather broadly here, and only about my perception of the majority of Swedes. I have ties to northern Sweden and Stockholm, but very few to the south, so regional variance might also be a factor to consider. Most Swedes live in the south, where my connections are few.

Hope this sheds some light for you!

I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency.

The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes to switch flights, but consumes a likely unhealthy amount of social media which is typically full of Americans.

In Sweden, the tax authority kinda do your tax fillings for you. They send them to you electronically once per year, and give you the chance to correct any inaccuracies, add any information they might have missed etc, and then sign the final result.

I don't think I'm the only one who signs those declarations without even reading them. Regardless of who is currently prime minister, the tax agency typically get it right, and I trust them enough to just accept what they say, and attach my legally binding signature without reading.

I'd estimate about 95% of my Swedish friends do the same.

The fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?

I don't claim to know or understand, but I can venture a guess: as far as I can tell, America doesn't really have a good digital identity solution. In fact, given the frequent online discussions about whether it should be allowed to vote without physical identification in America, I'm given to believe that you don't have a good personal identity system at all!

The above combined with the to me foreign notion that tax filings could be considered private(in Sweden, everyone's income and their complete tax filings are public information) probably makes it problematic for them to just send it out willy nilly. What if they sent you the wrong filings?

Based on a very widespread stereotype about Americans, I imagine the irs would get sued.

But, as previously stated, I've only been in America long enough to switch planes, so my guess is likely to be inaccurate!

American here; very accurate.

On the digital ID part, the government + regulated industries like banking will enforce validating specific types of IDs via third party companies and data sources to use said government / regulated industry services - which is used as a hacked duct tape and silly string version of digital ID. Other than that… yep you got it.

Unless you implement a way of stopping people from leaving until they pay (which is really expensive and inefficient), collecting data on who owes you money is sort of unavoidable, no? It's only when that data starts getting collected en masse for no good reason and retained ~forever that we start to run into problems.

My last job paid for parking in one of these places. When the CEO stopped paying (long, very stupid story) without telling us, the parking company sent me, personally, to collections despite having zero responsibility to or interaction with these people.

This made it interesting for me driving through Europe with my Canadian-plated vehicle.

Plenty of boom gates did not open

doesn't sweden just.. list everyone's full name, address, job, birthday, age and stuff on a public website?

i always found this so weird, it's like a stalker's paradise

How long before face readers are everywhere and sending bills to your home when you use a public toilet as a fee or cross the street wrong as a fine. Meanwhile every movement is logged forever. I've heard China already has this, and most people see it as dystopian and bad and ripe for abuse. But in countries like Sweden, trust in government is high, and convenience is convenience, so it becomes a norm that no one questions. This, imho, is not a good thing.

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