71–80 of 261 posts
As a Swede I love this openness. It puts everyone on an a level playing field and makes it much less dramatic and reduces the value of the data.
Than in a country of 10 million
I knew a software engineer who used to live in sweden. One day he had a payraise. Out of the blue his landlord raised his rent. Apparently she somehow found out about his payraise and now i know how. She even told him that she knows he can afford more. He left sweden for this reason and racism. Before you believe all them nice stories about scandinavia, be sure to talk to people that lived in any of those countries a…
Landlords cant raise rent as they please in Sweden, the renting market and the amount of rent is controlled by the goverment.
One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swede…
I remember someone told me that Swede has open tax record as well. Is it the case?
These databases are generally available not to benefit 'freedom of expression', but so that neighbors can easily spy on each other, or the newspapers can print-on-demand lists of "The richest people in YOUR area!".
Whatever else, the truly richest people have fixed the system so that their wealth isn't accessible in an online database.
Aside from the fact that Sweden is the most opinion-conformist country I've ever lived in (so that 'freedom of the press' is farcical at the best of times), when it comes to true freedom of speech the police will crush it mercilessly: literally shooting people in the streets, followed by kangaroo courts that rubber-stamp fake police evidence to convict peaceful protesters with draconian sentences.[1]
Governments, police and the authorities are all protected by extensive secrecy. It's only the ordinary 'sucker' who has the 'freedom' of exposing all their most private affairs for everyone to pry.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna (in Swedish)
PS: for once the multiple downvotes are themselves an artifact of the discussion- I'm betting from affronted Swedes lol - because being negative about Sweden isn't allowed to be stated. But Swedes are all very proud of freedom of expression
>"You see, in Sweden all citizens are required to have a physical street address connected to your social security number." What about homeless?
Homeless in Sweden? You'll be given a place to live in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A landlord in Sweden cannot increase the rent out of the blue. If there is a rental contract in place at least. If renting without a contract for some weird reason, well, you better be sure you rent from someone you trust. Like in most other countries I would expect.
Probably raised at renewal. Deflecting the issue really doesnt help. My advice stands - people should exercise due diligence before moving to that country.
One should always do as good due diligence as possible before doing a major change in life such as moving to another country. No matter which country it is.
Almost as interesting, you can (as I understand it) look up the current salary of anyone you want to. Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so.
No. Depends on how you look it up, but you could just send an email (from anonymous account if wanted) to the tax agency asking for someones salary. You get an answer back in a few days without them being notified.
We really need to get a handle on what privacy and anonymity mean. As someone who cares very much about privacy, this article just doesn't resonate with me. Thinking in terms of having some singular "identity" means you've already lost. The title of this post is straight up weird - "The only way of being anonymous is Sweden is illegal". That would imply that if you're walking down the street, anyone has the right to…
If you think about it, it didn't used to be very practical to keep your address highly private because so much information came by mail, so you'd end up sharing your address more widely with friends but even acquaintances. Without mobile phones it could be onerous to set up a meeting away from home if there was any likelihood it would need to be rescheduled at the last second. I believe (with no hard evidence) that "swing by my place and we'll go from there" used to be much more common, by necessity. It was routine for personal home addresses to be listed with the name of the occupant in widely distributed phone books. You could opt out of this by the time I was a kid. These days it might be considered doxing for a company to disseminate this information by default!
I do not think we should have to keep those norms forever, of course, but if we are going to start treating addresses as highly privileged maybe we should more intentional and methodical about it. It would mean trying to answer the question of "how do we preserve the public interest in knowing who owns a piece of land in a municipality, particularly when there is a complaint, an environmental concern, a tax policy question that is hard to answer without knowing who owns all the land in an area, etc."
Another good point you make is that SSNs are dangerous not in and of themselves but because of how they can be used. Like you said, they can be cross referenced if overcollected to build tracking profiles. But also, in the U.S., they have been improperly overloaded as an authentication token, so they have been made dangerous by misuse. But ideally we'd have a system where there is little/no danger in having your SSN exposed.