Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster
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MinID is only considered "secure" while BankID is considered "highly secure"; as the linked pdf report (on Norwegian) states - in Norway, due to the popularity/market dominance of BankID - a lot of the logins are "highly secure" - while in Sweden their (different, but with same name) BankID is only "secure" - and most services require only "secure" login.
In Norway there are AFAIK public services that require "highly secure" login - and there the public issued MinID isn't enough.
If 2fa for MinID is improved - I think it would easily be upgraded to "highly secure" (most other details are similar to BankID). That should take care of public services.
Private services that do not cater to the public good - would still need a portal similar to (or be granted use of) Idporten.
So I think catastrophe is a little hyperbolic - but the current path of BankID dominance isn't good.
Ed: I see the hn title is editorialized - TFA has a more balanced title.
Ed2: From the podcast - BankID might get downgraded to "secure" because of how 2fa is handled - so it's not only MinID that might need some adjustments.
Sure, some policymaker will probably interpret this as "introduce EID" but it does color public debate.
I think it's a shame MinID doesn't have the same level of security as BankID, we are really missing out on a great opportunity. But something tells me the powers that are in Norway's socialite community doesn't want it. In Norway we don't have that much monetary corruption, but we have a lot of "kompistjeneste"
eIDAS (EU Regulation No 910/2014) derives the LoA definition from ISO/IEC 29115:2013 LoA 2,3,4 to LoA “Low”, “Substantial” and “High” (LoA 1 is not mapped in eIDAS). eIDAS article 8 refers to the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1502 and it refers to ISO/IEC 29115:2013.
And, as the professor in the article explains, it is a “disaster” for a small minority. And those are not he same minority who struggled for the same reasons before, and those difficulties ought be addressed. The system can be improved.
But it’s largely a success for the vast majority too. I don’t personally know of anyone with a negative impression of it. It’s actually something that the average Nordic Baltic person is so used to and happy with that it only comes to mind when we meet people from countries that aren’t organised - and we feel sorry for them!
It’s the same situation with cash. Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.
there is no average person, it is a myth of statistics.
But Norway is a monarchy well connected with the global Epstein class so I doubt their political system can actually reach an shareholder-hostile edge case. And meanwhile the surveillance helps keeping internal peace because one can reliably deplatform dissenters and conspiracy theorists.
It's a win-win until the n-th generation of nepo children is trying to steal too much and everybody notices they have been robbed.
I don’t think that’s true. Also, never “trust” a bank with your money, for starters, “your money” is nothing but a fake number that doesn’t actually reflect a physical monetary asset, hence why if enough amount of people withdraw their money, you end up with a bank run, aka, the bank digital fake numbers are more than the actual physical papers. Additionally, in many cases you don’t want to be in entirely cashless system, besides the privacy concerns, you might get locked out of your account because the network operator malfunctioned (like Rogers in Canada back in 2022 I think, all ATMs were useless, purchase points, etc.), or maybe a sun coronal mass ejection that fries some utility power plants, or drop in the frequency and you end up like Spain last year or the year before.
The more you rely on one centralized point, the worse, hence why engineers avoid single point of failure in any design, be smart, and diversify your options.
It is.
Source, me in Sweden.
So I stopped using BankID over two years ago, and do most of my daily life in cash.
BankID is made by our banks but okay, I get the phone part.
How do you function day to day without BankID?
It is so integrated now """for convenience""" but yea it really is crazy. Especially how it is tied to having a bank account but the login is for everything. Payments, insurance etc...
Also how it needs Google play so Huawei phones got banned.
If BankID worked on a free OS then that would be nice for a few things (like paying taxes, which I still do on paper), but other things are both BankID and Apple/Google smartsphone.
For example, I've made it very clear to my kids' school that I do not and will not get a smartphone, so I cannot use their app (based on Google Classroom). It took months, but now they send me the weekly newsletter by email, and I can call to say if the kids are sick. While my wife can handle the scheduling changes for fritids.
I also have the advantage of living in the center of town, a block from the centralized government services office. The queue is very short most of the time. I also live above my bank, though I'm thinking of switching to Handelsbanken, which is about two blocks, since I've seen how Swedbank is deskilling their local branches.
For the bank I still use a bank dosa. For bus travel I use kontoladdning, though the local transit system wants to replace that with a dependency on (US-based) bank cards - something I think is bad for the unbanked (including youths), visitors from certain countries, and bad for Swedish security as it lets the US restrict someone's ability to use mass transit. For health care I call the local medical center.
I work for myself, through my own aktiebolag, and my accountant handles most of the bookkeeping side of things. My customers are all outside of Sweden, so they don't care about BankID.
A few years ago it was hard to explain to people why I didn't use US-based systems. Over the last couple of years it's become a lot easier, for obvious reasons.
There are still enough old people and others that at least essential services don't require BankID. My wife worked with Ukrainian refugees who had a work permit but couldn't get a bank account. The hotel paid their salaries in cash. That's several levels harder than I have to deal with.
You'll be surprised at how many places still take cash, or will do a faktura, or accept simple bank transfer like we all did 20 years ago.
When my coffee shop in Sodermalm’s card readers weren’t working they just gave me free coffee over taking cash. Cash in Sweden is a burden. Banks don’t want it and most won’t accept it.
I also think the days of cash being anonymous have passed. With cameras everywhere and the trivial ease with which numbers can be recorded and shared a government could probably trace the path of a bank note if it wanted to.
https://moneytransfers.com/sending-money/the-countries-most-...
That list is of the change in moving to cashless since Covid. Sweden is low in the list because it’s been cashless for such a long time already. Those places aren’t more cashless than Sweden. They are the ones that are moving towards cashlessness most dramatically in recent years.
> Norway, Sweden, and Israel partner to test CBDCs (https://reclaimthenet.org/norway-sweden-and-israel-partner-t...)
Debanking someone is basically ending their lives in modern days, when your ID is linked to the banks, an ID that’s also to be used for digital services, you could get debanked for criticizing a politician in the future, for example.
And uncle freedom sure will get that data from their “closest ally”, not to mention any breaches like what happened in Sweden recently, a country that also wants to strap tracking on 13yo.
Digital ID is a nightmare anywhere’s used, it will turn any government into a totalitarian state.
There are even tools are being sold to do that, an israeli company called logivote made a tool to scan the social media and check who bad mouthed the politicians. So expect in the near future, you bad mouth one, you get sent to jail the next day, or debanked.
Looking further their parent company is doing "aviation security services", oh how convenient!
Being able to sign contracts, engage with the healthcare system, file taxes, read messages from the government and do general banking without having to leave the home is a massive convenience boost.
We are a high trust society where the government or the banks are not out to "get you". The majority of the banks (not by volume but by numbers) are even in a structure without any ownership of the capital except for the depositors, and most of the profit from these banks that is not used to build the capital further is handed out to customers and/or the local community.
That's not the meaning of a "high trust society".
You are _trusting_ that the banks and the government are not out to get you. That doesn't mean that they _really_ aren't out to get you. You just believe they aren't and haven't yet been disappointed enough to change your belief...
Edit: and the original article shows btw. that there is yet another failure mode, not only "out to get you". It's that the banks and the government obviously don't care a bit if some people are intentionally left behind.
Last year the government launched an goverment owned alternative "myGov" and now has to claw back market share, which I don't see working out.
The article is light on details. Are people being denied BankID due to having an autism diagnosis?
There are some crazy details in this story that are presented as side notes in between long paragraphs of filler text that don’t contribute anything. It’s an article where you keep reading expecting some explanations that never arrive.
Of course, the flip-side, this would open up more opportunities for tracking (requiring the hardware keys to log into Facebook). However, in most societies, we do need some way of authenticating who is who, and at least this approach makes fraud much more difficult.
Besides that we have the technology for services to ask 'yes/no' questions of a secure enclave without revealing the personal data, like 'is this person's birthdate after May 29 2005', instead of letting every liquor store and gas station scan the barcode of your government ID including your home address
Sometimes it makes me feel crazy what we collectively have settled on.
> Digital Identity Management in Norway is a Success but also a Disaster
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