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The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

arstechnica.com

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Re: The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

#41

Post by gravypod »

Strom wrote: post #40
gravypod wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started watching this video expecting for him to be like all of my politicians are. I am happy that I was wrong. He seems to actually understand the underlying technology that he is pushing, and it seems like it is working. Is anyone here from Estonia who could comment on these new systems?

The digital systems work pretty well. The digital prescriptions are definitely convenient, especially as you can get them renewed via e-mail to your doctor and thus skip any visitation bills. I also still remember my amazement when it took me literally 5 minutes to register a new company online, 10 years ago. Not that much different from opening a Twitter account. An even older system is the tax one, where everything…

That's amazing. It seems like a polar opposite from the USA.

I'd not trust my government to develop any software for me to use but it seems like your government has an idea of how to make that work.

He mentioned it was all open source in the video. That's really cool and helps go the extra mile in my opinion to make it more acceptable to the end user.

Re: The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

#42

Post by gravypod »

dijit wrote: post #35
gravypod wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started watching this video expecting for him to be like all of my politicians are. I am happy that I was wrong. He seems to actually understand the underlying technology that he is pushing, and it seems like it is working. Is anyone here from Estonia who could comment on these new systems?

My girlfriend is Estonian, and she finds life incredibly complicated in both the UK and Sweden- I just asked, she misses that there was never a need for a government office, no queuing and everything was centrally managed, as long as she has her ID card and her "pin". She is mentioning the arduous processes we have for validating identity in Sweden and looking up financial history. Part of me feels like this is a dou…

Yea there are some privacy concerns and some social concerns but the way I see it is that our government already has all of the data they are looking at. In many cases, it's data they have generated about you.

No matter how hard you try, I don't think that there is much of a way to hide prescriptions and taxes from any government.

I'm just amazed that it "just works."

Re: The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

#44

Post by mk89 »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #38
jamesblonde wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy. Here in Sweden, everything is digitalized and it makes life easy. I think of this externality of managing your taxes and stuff like that as "societal tax". Time is money, and countries like Germany and the US have ridiculously high levels of "societal tax" - you…

> Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy. I think you are missing the elephant in the room: our (German) complete and utter incompetence when it comes to software development. Declaring taxes for my business still involves mailing many dead trees around the country, and I hate it. But what's the altern…

I agree with you, and the only way to improve that is to invest more in "software" (in general), although things are moving slowly, yet they move.

Re: The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

#45

Post by mk89 »

jamesblonde wrote: post #30
mk89 wrote: post #24

I agree on further digitalization of public services and stuff - come on, ... here in Germany you must store every kind of receipt for tax declaration (I don't know how this works in other countries, I just find it ridiculous nowadays). However, what the president of Estonia is talking about is basically not applicable to most of the current European countries, where people/countries raise walls, other countries thre…

Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy. Here in Sweden, everything is digitalized and it makes life easy. I think of this externality of managing your taxes and stuff like that as "societal tax". Time is money, and countries like Germany and the US have ridiculously high levels of "societal tax" - you…

I also want more digitalization, BUT. If this has to cost my own privacy then I would like to have the time to think about it. I would not like to see my personal/financial data online because a hacker found a hole in the system, or something like that.

Ah, and by the way, what people don't seem to understand is that it's also thanks to laws about privacy that Germany (and Europe in General) is funding more and more companies. People don't use Google Analytics due to that most of the time. Microsoft had to open a data center in Frankfurt, and so on, and so on. All this has diverse implications: hiring a company that keeps data in Germany. Who does it? German companies (or European companies). And money flows as it should. The country grows, people learn software, new jobs are created, and so on.

I would be not so hasty about changing privacy laws - they are there for a (good) reason (actually, more than one). Maybe in the next 10-15 years, when European (and German) software companies are more stable, then yes why not? But now, I am not so sure about it.

Re: The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

#46

Post by throwaway7767 »

laacz wrote: post #43
bergie wrote: post #13

There is a campaign collecting signatures to end geoblocking within EU: https://endgeoblocking.eu/

Why is there no verification of email adress you submit? Sadly it's hard to take seriously such a petition.

Would it be easier to take seriously if there were verification of email address? It's not like there's any requirement for identity verification before provisioning of an email account.
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