Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

As a Dane, having lived in other countries, MitID is an insanely superior to anything I've ever tried. It simplifies so many touchpoints with the government, and is honestly such a good upgrade going from nothing -> physical NemID card with codes -> digital MitID (literally "My ID").

The only real disruption I'd say is if you happen to be buying something online that triggers the 3DS prompt (an additional security layer to prevent cards getting stolen/scam). In Denmark the 3DS prompt for VISA at least uses MitID to verify you are the owner of the card, so that'll obviously not work when MitID is down.

I'll say, it has been surprisingly stable though otherwise, and disruptions usually aren't a big impact (I literally wouldn't have known unless I saw this HackerNews post).

As for a centralized identity system: I personally see this as an acceptable contract for living in a society. Most countries have SSNs anyways, your taxes and many other things are tied to this. Centralizing this identity allows the government to streamline so many things to give a better service to their citizens. For example, all official communication goes to your "DigitalPost" email inbox, your verify identity with "MitID", and every person or company has a registered "NemKonto" tied to them for any salary or government payouts.

I maybe see people get tripped up at the concept that your government should actually care about the service they deliver. That's probably already the point where we diverge when talking about if these things are a good idea or not.

But anything you can touch has the risk of being forged or destroyed.

The whole point of bank notes was that they're centrally backed- someone would take the responsibility of ensuring that it's hard to forge and backed by something "real".

But centralising it so completely has pretty concrete drawbacks, which is fine, if your infrastructure is perfectly reliable and your banks are trustworthy.

History has shown us that infrastructure is never perfect, and banks are not perfectly trustworthy. So, hedge your own risks.

A personal tragedy (losing some money) is materially different than the entire economy being screwed because of a programming issue, or a city being screwed because of an internet outage, or a person and their family being (additionally) screwed because they offended a politician.

It's just.. different levels, and the centralised convenience becomes a pretty catastrophic impact in the worst case; and on a long enough timeline, the worst case is inevitable.

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.

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.