Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

uio.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#21

Post by e12e »

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.

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#22

Post by bflesch »

wood_spirit wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#23

Post by tamimio »

wood_spirit wrote: post #17

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…

> 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.

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#24

Post by joaohaas »

Aurornis wrote: post #18

> 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…

I'm assuming it fails to do face recognition, but yes the article is clearly very one sided on making 'digital ID' look bad.

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#25

Post by buran77 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #19
wood_spirit wrote: post #17

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…

> average Nordic Baltic person there is no average person, it is a myth of statistics.

A meaningless distinction and unnecessarily nitpicky. From a scientific perspective it's not a myth, it's a valuable tool. For the average person (see what I did there?) it's not a mathematical formula, it's way of saying "that person whose characteristic being discussed is very common and representative of the whole group".

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#26

Post by lifestyleguru »

tamimio wrote: post #14
rokkamokka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from any other form of identification? If you are stripped of that you still wouldn't be able to access these services.

The difference is the link between your digital footprint and real life one. Without a digital ID, there’s a huge margin of using many digital services while maintaining a privacy, even more, anonymity too. With a digital ID, there’s a connected link between the two, further expanding the surveillance capabilities, coupled with AI to profile user’s sentiment and emotions (in Canada, they admit that will be one of the…

Jeez Israel is going at full speed... recently when attempting to create an account at one of the brokers based in EU I was redirected to do a "friendly 3D full face scan" with another Israeli company - Au10tix. I noped out of the website instantly.

Looking further their parent company is doing "aviation security services", oh how convenient!

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#28

Post by aboardRat4 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #19
wood_spirit wrote: post #17

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…

> average Nordic Baltic person there is no average person, it is a myth of statistics.

An average person has one testicle and one ovary.

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#29

Post by FpUser »

M95D wrote: post #13
rokkamokka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from any other form of identification? If you are stripped of that you still wouldn't be able to access these services.

I never heard of an ID card being revoked. Reasons for refusing to renew it are also very few in my country - like not having a place to live (owned or rented).

So homeless might be refused ID? They're no longer a person?

Re: Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster

#30

Post by woliveirajr »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #5
tamimio wrote: post #2

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 s…

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.

Brazil has the same. It's possible to login in the government platform by your bank login. Simplifies a lot for the general population that won't use password managers and so on. And, as banks use a 2FA, security is improved.
Post reply on HN