171–180 of 230 posts
Homeless / Underprivelleged? How does moving things online work for those in poor economic conditions since they might not have online access (no smart phone, etc).
I think this just adds the option and doesn't eliminate the in-person version.
+1. Careful still, public services are also a matter of human representation, of accessibility, to nurture the relation between (all) the citizens and the state (as it also is in the private sector, between a brand and customers). Moving public services online is great IFF it does not remove at the same time a satisfying option for offline/physical access to the same services, for those that are not able to use the o…
Website: https://www.id.ee/en/
Timeline of implementations: https://e-estonia.com/story/
Github: https://github.com/open-eid
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Seems odd they don't want an up to date photo.
They do, you need to submit at-most 6 month old photo while renewing. Or go to the office to take one. Either way, you also still need to go get the document from the office as it is only handed over by person (but you can pre-book a time slot!). Passport is a bit more complicated, since it requires fingerprints as well.
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I recently discovered that the U.S. Social Security Administration has business hours ... for their website. They operate a website that is closed at night and on weekends. One is hard-pressed to imagine the level of IT dysfunction necessary to reach this point.
I have not researched this but rather than being a sign of IT dysfunction my guess would be the government contracts out the maintenance of the web site to the private sector and the contract specs happen to be written to say it will be closed on nights and weekends. In theory this makes the contract cheaper than if the government was buying 24/7 support.
So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.
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The success of our Estonian digitalized government services is possible because we have: A nationwide digital ID, that can be used to authenticate someone, We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. The Id number enab…
> We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their o…
But having strong protection for privacy is a must also.
Every time someone accesses my data in the national registries the access is logged - who did it and when. For example I can see that the city I live in is checking if I still live there, because they offer free public transport to residents. Also I can see that the doctor I visited looked at my data, maybe also the aphotecary where I got my prescribed medicine from, because.. all the prescriptions are also digital documents, very-very rarely something is put on paper (for example, when a vet doctor prescribes some antibiotics and I can get them from the apothecary). Othewise I just give them my id card, they look at the number, type it in, and can see what I have been prescribed.
Article didn’t mention the best part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once-only_principle Basically the government isn’t allowed to ask you for any information more than once. They already know!
That sounds scary.
Why would having every government department, hospital, doctors/dentists office keep your data separately, probably in some unsecured excel file or whatever?
When we have one registry for everything, they can keep it secure by having some proper security guys design and audit it, we can see who has accessed my data and when, etc. If a hospital would keep your health records in their own system then.. they'd probably have some low paid IT guy design something and leak it accidentally online.
Be careful what you wish for. For the US if you automate public services you are going to eliminate Federal, State, and Local bureaucratic jobs as well as the support roles to interface to these services. For example if you automated taxing, you would eliminate IRS employees as well as accountants and software services such as Turbo Tax. In the US we don't have universal healthcare, universal free education, etc. so…