| ▲ | wayfwdmachine 2 hours ago |
| Ok, some important context for non-Swedes.
Anyone can get access to all Swedish (non-protected but those are a very VERY small subset) personal identification numbers by simply signing an agreement with SPAR[1] (the Swedish national people database). Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information. Using SPAR you can also get the home (and any additional) addresses of individuals A Swedish citizen database is... you know. fun. But not exactly hard to get hold of. [1] https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/engl... |
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| ▲ | picafrost 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think this is good to highlight for non-Scandinavians. Scandinavian countries are extremely open and transparent in a way that might be shocking for Americans. For example, in Norway, I can check nearly anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers, etc. on public websites. I can in theory look up anyone's tax filings. Personal identification numbers do not tend to be considered private in the same way that social security numbers in the US are. |
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| ▲ | kivle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | We're so open, we even leak our government source code _ourselves_ https://github.com/navikt | |
| ▲ | whynotmaybe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I heard a rumor that some people use this to check their neighbour's revenue and sometimes make snark comments if one of them has a high revenue but lives in a "average revenue" part of town. They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing. Any truth to that? | | |
| ▲ | kivle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There used to be a lot more of that, but a system was put in place where you have to identify yourself with electronic ID to access the information, and the information is logged so the other party can see it. Nowadays I think mostly journalists use it to pull up information about politicians and other people that are in the public spotlight. There are of course the yearly "richest people in Norway" lists in various categories. | |
| ▲ | ruszki 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What is the harm in this case? Shit people are shit even without information. They would be snark about something else then. | |
| ▲ | internet_points an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Making snark comments about that sounds very unlikely. More likely they'd have respect for someone living frugally and not showing off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante | |
| ▲ | ale an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes and no. You get notified if someone else actually asks for your revenue info and so in practice nobody actually does it. | | |
| ▲ | arcticfox 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Is this not trivial to get a random person to check stuff for you in exchange for making requests for them (on people they are interested in)? Or is that illegal? | | |
| ▲ | vodkapump 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There's paid services that pull it for you, most charging around 100nok (10eur) per lookup.[1] Media is also allowed to pull "top" lists like the 100 people with the most income in a city, 100 people with the most wealth in a city, etc. [1] https://sjekkskatt.no/ |
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| ▲ | sorum 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, that tracks. There's also the underlying current of Jantelagen (Law of Jante) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante |
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| ▲ | ivell 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How do they have handle identity thefts, spams, etc.? There are so many ways to misuse these data. Are the residents not concerned about this? | | |
| ▲ | ROllerozxa 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > How do they handle identity thefts By just accepting it as a normal fact of life that you will have some random stuff ordered in your name sooner or later with an invoice you'll have to dispute. Happened to a relative of mine, police do not care unless they order things above a certain value, without a police report you cannot get free ID protection, and then you'll have to sit for a long time in phone queues trying to cancel a subscription for a streaming service or whatever they ordered while get thrown around by support reps who go "you SURE you or someone in your family didn't order this?" | | | |
| ▲ | PeterisP 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The root cause of identity theft in USA and some other places is the lack of "proper" national identity and the associated use of various personal "secrets" (not that secret) for identity verification because there are no good easy other ways. Businesses in Scandinavia and many other countries would not treat someone knowing your personal information as any evidence of identity (because it's not); having all that information is not sufficient to impersonate you there - identity theft does happen but it would require stealing or forging physical documents or actual credentials to things like bank accounts; knowing all of what your mother or spouse would know is not enough to e.g. get credit or get valuable goods in your name. | |
| ▲ | boxed 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's just a unique ID of a person, it's not a password. I don't see how you can be confused by this. | | |
| ▲ | bondarchuk 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's also "anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers" according to the comment that this subthread of the conversation is about. |
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| ▲ | ROllerozxa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And then there are widespread amounts of identity theft and mapping out of minorities, but you may sleep well as everyone knowing where you do so is an important step in making sure corruption is no more, don't think too much about it. | | |
| ▲ | Batman8675309 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just a few years ago this was about to change in Sweden. But they didn't change it, because "women should be able to look up the men that they date". | | |
| ▲ | ROllerozxa an hour ago | parent [-] | | Oh yes. I'm Swedish and I do have to admit I have looked up quite a lot of people on these kinds of sites. It's become so normalised to do this even though I also feel like it would be better as a whole if they just did not exist in the first place. Last update I heard about something being done about it was this: https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/utredning... Not sure what the current status is. |
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| ▲ | ahoka 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not open but stupid, IMHO. |
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| ▲ | einr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information They are absolutely trivial to get. One click on mrkoll.se. |
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| ▲ | petcat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > by simply signing an agreement with SPAR But that seems like a completely different thing than a nefarious and anonymous person or group having access to the entire database. |
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| ▲ | wayfwdmachine 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, nefarious or anonymous people have never used the internet so they could never find out that this was all public information. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | public information if they signed an agreement with the Swedish government? | | |
| ▲ | einr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, public information for anyone. You realize that if it's public information, then it's public, and anyone can re-publish it online? There are websites for that. I can get the complete identification number, home address, phone number, etc for any Swedish citizen (that does not have a protected identity) in less than a minute. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can get all of that one-by-one? Or can you get the whole database at once? | | |
| ▲ | einr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I cannot trivially get the whole database, no. But I kind of fail to see what a malicious actor would do with a large database of public information that they couldn’t otherwise do. The system is designed such that you can’t really do a lot of malicious stuff with just public data, and the stuff you can do (scam calls, etc) is probably not meaningfully more effective if you have the whole database than if you do manual lookups or web scraping. I’m open to being proved wrong about that however. Basically: obviously it's not desirable to have that full database in the hands of a malicious actor but I'm not sure it's such a big deal either. Again, it's public data by design. |
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