alt Hacker NewsI'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes things easier for the state -- and I've seen produce some pretty good epidemiology work where the government can link purchasing habits and health outcomes(!) -- but it's a privacy nightmare.
MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running a custom rom. Reports from others who have disassembled it indicate that in fact a hard coded list of custom roms is checked against. It's a highly obsfucated binary, and by design is a single point of failure. If you sign in with an unauthorized device it helpfully centrally blacklists your IMEI. It's hard (but not impossible) to get a phone contract on Denmark without indirectly giving over your CPR number, so I imagine trying to get around this is frustrating. I didn't try and have a hardware dongle. One. By design, this whole system is a massive centralised single point of failure. It's absolutely key to Danish life.
That all said, most Danes would vigorously defend privacy, say that the state doesn't abuse its powers, and they're probably right. It's a very vivid vision of the 1960s Nanny State, where Nanny knows best and has your best interests at heart. Most of the time, she does. They're frequently voted as some of the happiest people on earth, so clearly the recipe of pay a ton of tax and get things from it works well. I find the privacy lack rather shocking and I've never got used to it -- in quite some ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that, and tell me to drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest. They point out that the UK has far more CCTV cameras and that we have more prosecutions for bent policemen and politicians. There's truth in all of this.
Either way, I'd be interested in seeing if they issue a post mortem on this. It'll cause a lot of issues for many, many people.
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Also British, living across the bridge in Malmö, Sweden.
I really like the centralised system, it makes navigating society surprisingly easy when compared to say, Germany or the UK.
The difference is that I sort of trust the Swedish government, they've never really done anything to breach that trust - up to and including their handling of COVID (while controversial, they took the stance of individual liberty and a "collective responsibility" over mandatory top-down systems).
The UK in contrast has a much more heavy handed relationship with the population, up to and including incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site or typing the letter "n" on social media. It's a different context entirely.
Also, BankID, the central system is a definite weakness, but you can have a card/pin device that still works, and it does work on grapheneOS, though it will complain a bit if you don't have google services installed... which I find hilariously awful...
I would recommend getting the hardware dongle. I don't have the app, never did, and I've had none of the issues others have been complaining. The dongle is, generally, a much better experience from what I can tell, except if you need to do any authorizations on the go.
Your other complaints: 100% agree, the whole thing is a privacy nightmare.
I wouldn't count on a post mortem of any value. They still refuse to explain how the system has been abused in the past. Regardless of how hard I try, I fail to understand how it has been abused after QR codes was added to ensure presence at the device you're trying to authenticate at. The system feels secure, but has been abused a number of times and we're almost never told how.
> but it's a privacy nightmare.
I've gone the other way from Denmark to UK. And I've often had to mail copies of my passport or other identity documents via email. And my bank requires me to regular scan my face to check that it aligns with the picture in my passport.
I have experienced the same privacy culture shock in Denmark. Generally, I think the people’s trust in their government is the greatest social asset of the danish society, as well as their biggest blind spot.
> in quite some ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that
Did they collectively close their eyes while Denmark was the latest, at EU presidency, in charge of pushing chat control?
>MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running a custom rom.
I find these arguments quite strange. A big part of MitID and similar services is to protect you against fraud. The most vulnerable in society (e.g. old people) aren't running these kinds of devices, and I'd rather we optimize for the general population and the people most at risk, rather than people running some weird setup that is almost identical to setups a scammer would run.
What privacy aspects are you lacking here? For all the services that MitID connects you to, there are government required responsibilities for these companies to track all of this information anyways and be able to provide it to the government if needed. That goes for banking, public services, telecom, etc. And this is in no way unique to Denmark, it's how most countries operate. Denmark has just acknowledged this and decided to make it easier.
Did you expect your UK bank to not be required to know who you are and be able to track and keep records of literally all financial interactions you have with them and their services? I'm a bit confused on what society you are comparing against.
Interesting. Swedish BankID, that I'd guess serves the same purpose, works just fine on GrapheneOS, as well as nation wide payment system Swish.
All of this is true.
Having lived in Germany it's quite different, but I'd argue the centralized handling of the CPR is actually quite convenient and doesn't meaningfully impact privacy. In Germany every authority has its own ID for you anyway (my password manager has a category "Government Primary Keys" for this), however that means that you have to provide all your information from scratch to every authority. This would theoretically lead to more privacy if we lived in 1926, but now computers are ubiquitous and a rogue government (like Germany is close to electing) can just correlate these keys together. Relational databases have existed for decades and JOINS are cheap. Thanks to surveillance capitalism by now we have very sophisticated ways to deanonymize people, the government can just hire someone to do it.
So the privacy in Germany is most often inconvenience for the citizen paired with hardly any privacy gain from a potentially hostile government. At this point I think the better solution is to avoid electing hostile governments. To Denmarks credit, they're currently doing that better than many other European countries.
The Netherlands had a similar system with BSN and DigiD.
I personally prefer it, and I wish the country I live in right now had a better centralized system to deal with the government. It massively reduces bureaucracy and the need for me to produce all sorts of extremely privacy-invasive documents (such as bank statements, utility bills, scans of my driver license and passport) when dealing with the government. Sometimes I even need to mail those things, like, with an envelope.
The government can and will collect all data it needs about you at any given time, no matter if there's a centralized ID or not. It just spares everyone time and effort by removing friction.
Also, I have a very hard time to take seriously someone that unironically says the words "nanny state". It says a lot about your stance on the role of governments and society in general. What it says, to me, is very unflattering.
Italian living in Sweden, Malmö, and lived in the UK in the past.
I don't get the obsession you Brits have against IDs, in Europe you are pretty much the only ones. But a lot of what you say resonates with my observations:
- single point of failure: absolutely, but so is the "sign in with Google" or equivalent. It's just too convenient. I'd rather have a public service do it than a private company that can cut you out at any time without any explanation.
- Nanny State: 100% also in Sweden, actually worse here. But historically they have been pretty good at protecting freedoms, so far. The UK (or Italy) may be less nanny, but have got some very illiberal things going on these days (left or right government doesn't really matter, it seems).
- Happiest people on earth: I really doubt the surveys measure happiness. They tend to measure trust in institutions, which is very high in Scandinavia.
- It's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that: exactly the same in Sweden! They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes. I guess that it's the other side of the same trust of the previous point.
- Drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest: At least you've got øl, in Sweden alcohol is taboo. Forests are nice, but become boring quite quickly :)