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Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

swissinfo.ch

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Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#211

Post by [deleted] »

RedShift1 wrote: post #102
ncphil wrote: post #81

"... almost no government has the IT capacity and resources to single-handedly develop an eID quickly and to the appropriate standards." Bullshit. We're talking identity management here. Any government that can't handle that internally doesn't deserve to exist. What that's really about is feathering the nests of tech industry donors (and/or the non-tech middlemen or middlewomen who seem to grow like weeds around the…

Belgium has been doing digital identities for years now, we had our first identity cards with chip and digital signature I think 15 years ago? I frequently use it to sign documents and login to some government stuff. So if Belgium, which didn't have a government 3 out of the last 10 years, can do it, surely Switzerland can do it too.

[deleted]

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#212

Post by caskstrength »

nickez wrote: post #182
null_object wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BankID doesn't store any information I work with systems that use BankID identification, and know for a fact that you are wrong, because many (though not all) of the data-points collected by the banks can be retrieved for payment. For instance, if you just logged-in with the service I work with, I can retrieve your full-name, birthdate, your marital status, name of your spouse, their birthdate, any children and the…

That is all public data. You can get that through open channels like birthday.se as well. I've been at BankID and I know for a fact exactly what information they store. They store only what is necessary from a regulatory standpoint.

Are personal mobile phone numbers considered public information in Sweden?

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#213

Post by dang »

eznzt wrote: post #14
wirrbel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me how people buy into the right-wing narrative about politicians having invited refugees to Europe, when in fact, the EU is trying hard to keep them from entering in the first place. What might have prevented the refugee crisis might have been if the middle-east region had not been destabilised in the previous decades. And part of that destabilisation is due to the US Republican party pushing for an invasi…

[flagged]

You can't do this here.

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#214

Post by wsc981 »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #195
101008 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand this? I went to Switzerland once (I was young, 20ish) and I spent only one day at Geneva. It didn't look xenophobic, but very strict. I am interested in knowing more about this, thanks!

Sure, there are tons of foreigners in Geneva, since e.g. CERN is there. But native Swiss people will never consider you their equal. You can live and work in Switzerland for your whole life, but they will never consider you Swiss. Of course, they are also very polite about it. I’m not talking about US-redneck-tier xenophobia.

> But native Swiss people will never consider you their equal. You can live and work in Switzerland for your whole life, but they will never consider you Swiss.

But it's the same in many countries. I don't necessarily see a problem with that. Do you view this issue as problematic and if so, why?

I live in Thailand and Thai people will never consider me a Thai, even if I would speak fluent Thai and would conform to all societal norms. I've moved to Thailand and decided that regardless of this, it's a decent place for me to stay, better than The Netherlands where I came from.

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#215

Post by Avamander »

dijit wrote: post #187
edoceo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Estonia too!

and Sweden. But these are largely outsourced to private companies iirc. There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company)

> There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company)

No.

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#216

Post by Nextgrid »

labawi wrote: post #93
ILikeBikes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest European standard for IDs is a credit-card sized of plastic with a chip in it. It should allow more security, because digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities. But also you could use them more easily in other countries, as it can be read by a computer, and not a human that speaks a finite set of languages. Lastly, you could use them for authentication for various online and da…

> digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities Yet there are countries running 3072-bit RSA on Infineon chips, because their 3K keys are least broken. Discovery also entailed country-wide certificate revocation, which IIRC happened days if not weeks after the flaws were public, while the law states a digital signature has the same bearing as a physical one.

I would still argue that the losses caused by this breach were less than what other countries using a paper-based system see on a regular basis, both due to malicious action as well as the mere overhead of said paper-based system.

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#217

Post by XorNot »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #51
esja wrote: post #8

Quite a few people who voted against this did so purely because they didn’t want private companies controlling the system. If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.

Yes, and that's a good thing. Balkanizing ID info between a gazillion government databases as we do in the US just creates inefficiency, and raises the thirst for more intensive surveillance to counter the inefficiency with which the data is used. (Consider the talk after 9/11 on the FBI and CIA not sharing info, and then we get the Patriot Act.)

That article about effective government policy being a database access policy a month or so ago was particularly illuminating (and made a lot of sense to me). That any given policies effectiveness really depends on whether you can actually construct - functionally - an appropriate database view to implement it's stages.

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#218

Post by Nextgrid »

genericacct wrote: post #156
avereveard wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our country rolled out two certification based systems (Carta Nazionale Servizi which then got rolled into the Carta di Identità Elettronica), plus a federation based system built around SAML (Sistema Pubblico di Identità Digitale) where you can access to most italian bureoucracy. And we're talking about Italy, not some first rated technological paradise.

Yes and now your picture, a picture of your id card, your email and telephone are in the hands of the same people who store banking passwords in plaintext..

Your picture, e-mail and telephone is mostly public (social media, etc), and the government would have your ID card information anyway - I don't see how this is worse?

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#219

Post by zorked »

wombatmobile wrote: post #55

Switzerland has an awesome electoral system [1]. Instead of being ruled by a president or a prime minister who can be polarising, divisive, or selective, Switzerland has an Executive Council. The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson. This means t…

It has its advantages and disadvantages. It is also the political system that caused this:

"In 1991 following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) became the last Swiss canton to grant women the vote on local issues."

Notice how it was a court decision, not a result of the political process. I'd say 1991 is a bit too late to have full voting rights for women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

Re: Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies

#220

Post by esja »

throw0101a wrote: post #197
esja wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has one of the largest immigrant populations in the world per capita: 29.9% according to the link below. Very few countries are ahead of this. Even Australia is only 30%, and Canada (which has often led the world in immigration statistics) is 21.3%. Perhaps you can provide some evidence for your statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

Out of the 1.9M immigrants/permanent residents in Switzerland, 1.6M (84%) are from Europe: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland For Canada, the top ten breakdown of immigrants are: 8.9% from India, 8.6% from China, 7.8% from Philippines, 6.6% from UK, 3.3% from US, 3% from Italy, 2.8% from Hong Kong, 2.7% from Pakistan, 2.2% from Vietnam, 2.1% from Iran. Add those up, and you're only up to about…

So? How does any of that prove Switzerland is xenophobic?
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