The article is a little one sided, as it doesn't touch upon MinID which is a government ID service, and Idporten which is an authentication service that allows use of different EIDs, like MinID and BankID.
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.
The article title actually says it is a success as well as a disaster. The title here has been shortened.
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.
> Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.
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.
Cashless society is amazing until the foreign shareholders of your core suppliers of digital infrastructure develop their own political agenda.
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.
> The report tells the story of Bendik, who has Down syndrome and is denied BankID, thereby losing access to digital public services due to his diagnosis.
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.
On the plus side, their database has still not been hacked .. like it has happened one month ago in France, with the "ANTS" (the French equivalent). More than 10 millions people had their data leaked including pretty much everything from SSN, to email, phone, etc. A mine gold for Phishers and Scammers.
Digital ID is a catastrophe, in Norway or elsewhere. But that doesn’t matter because the purpose of such ID is more surveillance, and if any issue happens you might end up liable like that man mentioned in the article. Right now in countries where digital ID isn’t yet implemented, phone numbers are used instead to link your digital identity to the real one, and most countries require government ID to issue one, and sometimes a biometric identification too, that number is later used in online services or messaging apps that links back to you. Watch now the applications that still insist on having phone numbers as an ID removing them once the digital ID is used instead.
I'm confused how Nordic countries accepted linking banking login with government ID. Neither of them is your friend and both of them are not a friend in a completely different way.
It's not linking banking login with government id.
It is a story of the banks solving an issue with remote identification and the system working well enough that the public/government also want to use it for other things.
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.
The article is a little one sided, as it doesn't touch upon MinID which is a government ID service, and Idporten which is an authentication service that allows use of different EIDs, like MinID and BankID.
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.
The article title actually says it is a success as well as a disaster. The title here has been shortened.
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.
> Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.
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.
> average Nordic Baltic person
there is no average person, it is a myth of statistics.
Cashless society is amazing until the foreign shareholders of your core suppliers of digital infrastructure develop their own political agenda.
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.
> The report tells the story of Bendik, who has Down syndrome and is denied BankID, thereby losing access to digital public services due to his diagnosis.
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.
On the plus side, their database has still not been hacked .. like it has happened one month ago in France, with the "ANTS" (the French equivalent). More than 10 millions people had their data leaked including pretty much everything from SSN, to email, phone, etc. A mine gold for Phishers and Scammers.
Why would they leak the data of only 10M people and not all? Just to cause damage or were some people filtered out?
An outstanding solution no one asked for.
Digital ID is a catastrophe, in Norway or elsewhere. But that doesn’t matter because the purpose of such ID is more surveillance, and if any issue happens you might end up liable like that man mentioned in the article. Right now in countries where digital ID isn’t yet implemented, phone numbers are used instead to link your digital identity to the real one, and most countries require government ID to issue one, and sometimes a biometric identification too, that number is later used in online services or messaging apps that links back to you. Watch now the applications that still insist on having phone numbers as an ID removing them once the digital ID is used instead.
I'm confused how Nordic countries accepted linking banking login with government ID. Neither of them is your friend and both of them are not a friend in a completely different way.
It's not linking banking login with government id. It is a story of the banks solving an issue with remote identification and the system working well enough that the public/government also want to use it for other things.
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.
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Probably because they're not corrupt America. They don't walk around checking their back every minute for "Uncle Freedom" screwing them over.
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That seems better than the alternative in Belgium. There the prevalent ID app "itsme" was launched by a consortium of banks.
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.
Wait until EU Dugital Wallet in 2027, that will be the ultimate fiasco.