Having someone's personal identity nummer (personnummer) is in itself enough to do a lot of damage. Many Swedish online shops will happily send you goods along

Having someone's personal identity nummer (personnummer) is in itself enough to do a lot of damage. Many Swedish online shops will happily send you goods along with an invoice that you pay later. The invoice option is often only available if you provide your personnummer - which as I mentioned is public information, a phone call away - and have the goods sent to the address tied to that number. If you live in a house with a mailbox outdoors, a thief could order stuff to your address and empty the mailbox before you. "Stuff" could also be things like mobile phone subscriptions and whatnot. Or, having your personnummer, someone could send a form to the tax agency to have your official address changed! I believe they do send a letter to the old address saying the address has been changed to <new address>. But there's time to do bad stuff in between the time of the change and your discovery of it. (If, indeed, you do discover it. You might be traveling somewhere, a fact that might've been gleaned from your social media activity.) And, as breakingcups points out above, even if it were the case that sound security procedures were implemented in Sweden, that wouldn't matter much for the numerous non-Swedish services most Swedes use every day. Anyway -- people being able to do stuff in your name is just one thing. I don't want the whole world to know my address, or marital status, or date of birth, etc - period. It's about privacy.