5 ms·

How is this different from practically every kind of ID card? Don't they all usually have 1. Your name 2. Your picture 3. Your date and place of birth 4. Da

• dtech 11y ago
  I assume there is resistance against it because it wasn't mandatory to have one before (in my country carrying an ID became mandatory in 2005 and there was quite some resistance). Furthermore there is some privacy/security risk because these cards seem to have a (RFID/NFC or similar) chip on it.
  • pmontra 11y ago
    Many countries have some sort of photo id's, think of driving licenses. What's odd here is that they have to wear it in plain sight and use it all the time. A company badge is a credential valid only within the company, this is valid across the country for all kind of purposes. I won't feel comfortable using my passport to open doors. It's disproportionate to the importance of the credential. There are years I don't use my passport at all.
• kalleboo 11y ago
  Most of the controversy is because they've never had a mandatory identification number before, and there's always going to be fear and resistance against introducing that kind of thing. I think Japan is a highly privacy-conscientious society, for instance it's still very cash-based. The less populistic and more informed resistance is, as I see it, based on the fact that the My Number is designed to be a "secret" number you're only supposed to share with the authorities (as in, high risk of identity theft if the number is leaked) similar to the US SSN. But in order to try to increase popularity (and adoption), they're trying moves such as adding a grocery tax-refund scheme, which necessitates showing the ID card with the number prominently printed to minimum wage cashiers, etc. They've tried to placate fears with comments such as "but it's illegal for the cashiers to look at the number" and "you can have a new number issued 3 times!". I'm from another country with a personal ID number. I find it very handy. But there it's not assumed to be secret (even some online shopping sites will accept it as entry to auto-populate your address from the population register), so there's some extra e.g. ID checks when you use it, lowering the risk of identity theft.
  • Canada 11y ago
    Population register? That sounds like a database I'd like to query millions of times. Which country are you from?
    • orjan 11y ago
      Sweden, I assume. The personnummer (personal number) consists of the following: - The birth date, e.g. 640823 (YYMMDD) - The birth number, three digits. Last digit is odd for men and even for women. - A check digit, calculated by the Luhn algorithm. A full example: 640823-3234 -- a male born on August 23, 1964.
      • kwhitefoot 11y ago
        Or Norway. Very similar except five digits after the birthdate. But no id card here; although my driving license is a de facto id card.
    • vilhelm_s 11y ago
      Assuming this is Sweden, the full database is not generally handed out, although you can call the government agency and ask them to do individual queries (e.g. if you are trying to find someone but only know their name and not their address). However, the database can be given out in full under certain circumstances. In particular, companies which do credit checks are given realtime access to it. In maybe an unanticipated turn of events, one of the the credit check companies (Bisnode AB) then decided to sell access to it more generally, so nowadays it's fairly widely available to companies. In particular, there are a bunch of websites (hitta.se , birthday.se, ...) which let's you cross-reference name, address, and date of birth for anybody.
  • spacehome 11y ago
    > ... similar to the US SSN That ship sailed a long time ago.
• RyJones 11y ago
  My US passport lists my place of birth but not where it was issued (unless you mean "the US"). My drivers license lists my DOB but not my birthplace.
  • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    All US passports are issued by the us department of state, which is what you put in the "where was the passport issued" field of a visa application. A bit confusing.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      US passports used to have a place of issue. The current ones don't seem to any longer.
      • gherkin0 11y ago
        Yeah, the "authority" for my old was the "Charleston Passport Center," the authority for my new one is the "United States Department of State."
      • RyJones 11y ago
        That's what I was on about. My fault for being so terse
        • ghaff 11y ago
          Giving bureaucracy the benefit of the doubt :-) there may have once been a reason to know which office some paperwork was filed in a cabinet in. Today, everything is presumably all digitized in a centralized database somewhere even if the clerical work is distributed.
• level3 11y ago
  The main difference is that the My Number system is basically the equivalent of a U.S. Social Security Number, in the sense that the number will be potentially integrated with things like taxes, pension, bank accounts, health records, etc. This obviously has some conveniences, but also carries more risk. Naturally, losing your card is much worse than losing a basic ID card. Also note that the 12-digit My Number sticks with you throughout your life, unlike an ID number that can be changed. So once you obtain someone's number, they have no easy way of invalidating it so that you can't use it.