21 ms·

In Estonia virtually every process is digitized

137 points by breck 9y ago

silversmith 9y ago
The article positions the Estonian ID number as something magical and superior to SSN. In reality, out of the 11 symbols, 6 are governed by your date of birth and another one denotes the gender, and out of the remaining four one is a checksum digit. The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information, so you can't get a loan on your neighbours name just because you caught a glimpse of his passport.
- samstave 9y ago
  Sure, but isn't it interesting that freaking ESTONIA has been a forefront thinking country when it comes to tech-as-right country? FFS - I live and only have ever worked in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even get freaking DSL for five years after it was invented in San Jose!
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    No, it's not. Baltics got their independence in 1991 and they had to re-build a lot of infrastructure rendering it more modern.
    - mamon 9y ago
      Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.
      - Retric 9y ago
        It's the other way around. Remember, countries pay for R&D independent of the number of people in it, but they only get taxes relative to their population. So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT or deal with worse systems. What's going on is larger counties made the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to learn from.
        DrScump 9y ago
        So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT That... or just import IT that was already developed elsewhere.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        vilmosi 9y ago
        Let's be frank, R&D costs are not the problem here.
        Retric 9y ago
        Nobody sells 100% of IT in a box for an arbitrary country, off the self, zero customization required. Now, they can import things like operating systems, routers, word processors, etc, but so can large counties. And even then localization may not work out of the box. Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.
        KekDemaga 9y ago
        I disagree A database for 1.3 million users? You can use off the shelf software. 350 million? You need a entirely different class of solution.
      - hellofunk 9y ago
        A country's size cannot be overstated. I don't know about cost, but for mere agility, the smaller a country is, the more nimble it can be for all sorts of reform and progressive progress. Singapore and the Netherlands are both small countries that have managed to overhaul aspects of society without much barrier in years past. Germany is a big place, the U.S. much bigger. Estonia, tiny. You can do all sorts of things when you have just a few people it will affect.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that help?
      - vilmosi 9y ago
        Economies of scale would make the opposite true.
        dx034 9y ago
        Population density is probably the important factor. Small countries tend to have a higher population density which makes infrastructure cheaper.
        vilmosi 9y ago
        I have no idea if that's true in general, but, in this case, Estonia is the one with the lower population density.
    - omginternets 9y ago
      Non sequitur. It does not follow from your argument that there is nothing to be learned from the Estonian model. If nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise [economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is much discussion of the US (and several European countries') aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity of modernizing them is being scrutinized. Granted, this kind of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Several of the Nordic/Baltic countries are like that. Why does Russia not follow that pattern? What's different about it culturally?
    - elefanten 9y ago
      There's probably something to being a lot bigger and having more diverse population density. But ultimately the biggest culprit is probably the major political, economic and cultural hangovers from over a century of political instability.
    - aquadrop 9y ago
      Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation.
      - baybal2 9y ago
        >Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation. Yet, but the prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level of technical comprehension comparable to people called "jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30 somethings." You guys in the West complain about age discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would. What makes a seeming difference in the level of quality is that experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum significant portion of any much senior developers on the job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.
- perfmode 9y ago
  > The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information That's precisely the issue with SSN.
  - dx034 9y ago
    For the SSN it was ignored. In other European countries that law works as well. I've never been identified with an ID number anywhere in Europe. You always have to provide the corresponding document. Where IDs are used for identification they're not shared with private companies.
- shireboy 9y ago
  Can you explain this more? The ID number can't be treated as identifying information? ID literally stands for Identifier- if not used as identifying, how is it used? How does one identify themselves when getting a loan if not by using their ID?
  - dwild 9y ago
    I guess he means something closer to treated as an authentification means. It identifies someone but it doesn't authentify him. Just like shireboy is your identity but it doesn't authentify you.
  - ProblemFactory 9y ago
    In the US, the Social Security Number is widely regarded as a "secret password". Not as an identifier, but authentication credentials. If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet. But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack. If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.
  - skeletal88 9y ago
    The ID number is used to identify us in all the government databases, it's an universal foreign key. If the police want to know my address then they use our x-road to connect to the API of the population registry and call a method to get my address using my ID number. If they want to see what cars I own and if I have done my yearly technical inspection then the use my ID number to get the data needed. When someone wants a loan or anything like that then we have to show our real ID card or passport, or authenticate on the web with our smartcard and pin. So nobody can do stuff that's possible in the us - apply for credit cards and loans without authenticating properly.
unitboolean 9y ago
Meanwhile, Germany is moving in the opposite direction. Taxes are increasing and now Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world (according to OECD). and freelancers here can't even work without a tax advisers who will manage all their taxes, because the system is so complicated. Mobile internet is extremely expensive. Just one day of using mobile internet in Germany will cost you more than a a whole month mobile internet in Ukraine... everything is very bureaucratic and a lot of paper work is required on every corner. and don't forget, there are more than 300000 laws and rules for everything. I can keep this list forever, but after all, I think I should just move to Estonia, because Germany is definitely not for me.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  Sounds a lot like Spain, rules and paperwork. Taxes are lower but so crappy that even with an accountant you often pay the weirdest things and cannot declare many of the legitimate expenses you might have so in the end I pay as much as I did in NL. The Estonia e-residency is very good for ‘nomads’ ; if you travel a lot (say you do not reside in one country 6 months + 1 days and (but this is debatable somehow) are not in a country more than 60 days continues, you can have a company in Estonia and declare tax for that company there. Which is to say, no tax until you take money out. If you don’t travel like that it is far more complex.
  - iagovar 9y ago
    Spain is not nearly as complicated for a freelance. The problem in Spain is that the administration is a disaster in the "customer care" level. Also, every time a new technology appears they have to open a process for companies to bid (basically because their own IT dept is totally overloaded and I highly doubt they are keeping up with technologies) and do whatever is needed, but it's at least one year cycle. They try to make everything anti-cheat, but in the end cheaters cheat anyway, and in the process they make everything slow and painful.
- tormeh 9y ago
  It's not moving in the other direction. In fact there's a clear political consensus among the parties (probably) making up the next government that "digitization" should be one of the main foci of attention going forward. Particularly the liberal parties of course (Greens, FDP), but the CDU seem to also fancy this newfangled internet-thingy. Fifteen years late, but moving in the right direction. I have the feeling this is generally true in the other conservative parts of the EU as well. Eyes are very much on Estonia in the EU for this reason. It's all very sluggish, but the wheels are starting to turn, I think.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Animats 9y ago
The Starship delivery robot is real, but it's not really operational. One can be seen in downtown Redwood City, wandering around with a keeper following it. It's been doing that for six months. They have a few in Estonia, a few in San Francisco, and a few in London. All demos. Starship reminds me of Better Place, the car battery swap company out of Israel. Too much PR, too many demos spread around the world, not enough profitable deployment. It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used.
- tehlike 9y ago
  shameless plug for battery swap on uavs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cUnNtTElaaVJWRDA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cUnNtTElaaVJWRDA... minutes 1:05 onwards. and this is from tesla: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event But seems like Tesla discontinued battery swapping in favor of superchargers.
- emerongi 9y ago
  There is a drone delivery system that is being developed right now. The plan is to install towers into buildings, where the drones can land and drop off the deliveries. You could potentially do your shopping at work, and then pick up your deliveries at the door once you come home (or have them delivered at your workplace). I'm much more excited for this than the robot.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    In many areas, it won't stay at the door intact by the time you get home.
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      But the roof would probably be fine, which is where the drones would drop the packages. Most package theft from what I can tell happens from strangers, not tenants, and tenants are probably the only people with roof access.
benevol 9y ago
The flip side of this movement is of course even better profiling and mass surveillance.
- skeletal88 9y ago
  The government already knows a lot about you, doesn't matter if you live in the US or Estonia or Germany. Having an ID number doesn't enable the government to spy even more on it's citizens. The ID card and id number make it safer than the alternatives.

137 points by breck 9y ago

The article positions the Estonian ID number as something magical and superior to SSN. In reality, out of the 11 symbols, 6 are governed by your date of birth and another one denotes the gender, and out of the remaining four one is a checksum digit. The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information, so you can't get a loan on your neighbours name just because you caught a glimpse of his passport.

samstave 9y ago
Sure, but isn't it interesting that freaking ESTONIA has been a forefront thinking country when it comes to tech-as-right country? FFS - I live and only have ever worked in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even get freaking DSL for five years after it was invented in San Jose!
- romanovcode 9y ago
  No, it's not. Baltics got their independence in 1991 and they had to re-build a lot of infrastructure rendering it more modern.
  - mamon 9y ago
    Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.
    - Retric 9y ago
      It's the other way around. Remember, countries pay for R&D independent of the number of people in it, but they only get taxes relative to their population. So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT or deal with worse systems. What's going on is larger counties made the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to learn from.
      - DrScump 9y ago
        So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT That... or just import IT that was already developed elsewhere.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        vilmosi 9y ago
        Let's be frank, R&D costs are not the problem here.
        Retric 9y ago
        Nobody sells 100% of IT in a box for an arbitrary country, off the self, zero customization required. Now, they can import things like operating systems, routers, word processors, etc, but so can large counties. And even then localization may not work out of the box. Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.
      - KekDemaga 9y ago
        I disagree A database for 1.3 million users? You can use off the shelf software. 350 million? You need a entirely different class of solution.
    - hellofunk 9y ago
      A country's size cannot be overstated. I don't know about cost, but for mere agility, the smaller a country is, the more nimble it can be for all sorts of reform and progressive progress. Singapore and the Netherlands are both small countries that have managed to overhaul aspects of society without much barrier in years past. Germany is a big place, the U.S. much bigger. Estonia, tiny. You can do all sorts of things when you have just a few people it will affect.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that help?
    - vilmosi 9y ago
      Economies of scale would make the opposite true.
      - dx034 9y ago
        Population density is probably the important factor. Small countries tend to have a higher population density which makes infrastructure cheaper.
        vilmosi 9y ago
        I have no idea if that's true in general, but, in this case, Estonia is the one with the lower population density.
  - omginternets 9y ago
    Non sequitur. It does not follow from your argument that there is nothing to be learned from the Estonian model. If nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise [economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is much discussion of the US (and several European countries') aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity of modernizing them is being scrutinized. Granted, this kind of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Several of the Nordic/Baltic countries are like that. Why does Russia not follow that pattern? What's different about it culturally?
  - elefanten 9y ago
    There's probably something to being a lot bigger and having more diverse population density. But ultimately the biggest culprit is probably the major political, economic and cultural hangovers from over a century of political instability.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation.
    - baybal2 9y ago
      >Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation. Yet, but the prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level of technical comprehension comparable to people called "jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30 somethings." You guys in the West complain about age discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would. What makes a seeming difference in the level of quality is that experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum significant portion of any much senior developers on the job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.
perfmode 9y ago
> The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information That's precisely the issue with SSN.
- dx034 9y ago
  For the SSN it was ignored. In other European countries that law works as well. I've never been identified with an ID number anywhere in Europe. You always have to provide the corresponding document. Where IDs are used for identification they're not shared with private companies.
shireboy 9y ago
Can you explain this more? The ID number can't be treated as identifying information? ID literally stands for Identifier- if not used as identifying, how is it used? How does one identify themselves when getting a loan if not by using their ID?
- dwild 9y ago
  I guess he means something closer to treated as an authentification means. It identifies someone but it doesn't authentify him. Just like shireboy is your identity but it doesn't authentify you.
- ProblemFactory 9y ago
  In the US, the Social Security Number is widely regarded as a "secret password". Not as an identifier, but authentication credentials. If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet. But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack. If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.
- skeletal88 9y ago
  The ID number is used to identify us in all the government databases, it's an universal foreign key. If the police want to know my address then they use our x-road to connect to the API of the population registry and call a method to get my address using my ID number. If they want to see what cars I own and if I have done my yearly technical inspection then the use my ID number to get the data needed. When someone wants a loan or anything like that then we have to show our real ID card or passport, or authenticate on the web with our smartcard and pin. So nobody can do stuff that's possible in the us - apply for credit cards and loans without authenticating properly.

unitboolean 9y ago

Meanwhile, Germany is moving in the opposite direction. Taxes are increasing and now Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world (according to OECD). and freelancers here can't even work without a tax advisers who will manage all their taxes, because the system is so complicated. Mobile internet is extremely expensive. Just one day of using mobile internet in Germany will cost you more than a a whole month mobile internet in Ukraine... everything is very bureaucratic and a lot of paper work is required on every corner. and don't forget, there are more than 300000 laws and rules for everything. I can keep this list forever, but after all, I think I should just move to Estonia, because Germany is definitely not for me.

tluyben2 9y ago
Sounds a lot like Spain, rules and paperwork. Taxes are lower but so crappy that even with an accountant you often pay the weirdest things and cannot declare many of the legitimate expenses you might have so in the end I pay as much as I did in NL. The Estonia e-residency is very good for ‘nomads’ ; if you travel a lot (say you do not reside in one country 6 months + 1 days and (but this is debatable somehow) are not in a country more than 60 days continues, you can have a company in Estonia and declare tax for that company there. Which is to say, no tax until you take money out. If you don’t travel like that it is far more complex.
- iagovar 9y ago
  Spain is not nearly as complicated for a freelance. The problem in Spain is that the administration is a disaster in the "customer care" level. Also, every time a new technology appears they have to open a process for companies to bid (basically because their own IT dept is totally overloaded and I highly doubt they are keeping up with technologies) and do whatever is needed, but it's at least one year cycle. They try to make everything anti-cheat, but in the end cheaters cheat anyway, and in the process they make everything slow and painful.
tormeh 9y ago
It's not moving in the other direction. In fact there's a clear political consensus among the parties (probably) making up the next government that "digitization" should be one of the main foci of attention going forward. Particularly the liberal parties of course (Greens, FDP), but the CDU seem to also fancy this newfangled internet-thingy. Fifteen years late, but moving in the right direction. I have the feeling this is generally true in the other conservative parts of the EU as well. Eyes are very much on Estonia in the EU for this reason. It's all very sluggish, but the wheels are starting to turn, I think.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Animats 9y ago

The Starship delivery robot is real, but it's not really operational. One can be seen in downtown Redwood City, wandering around with a keeper following it. It's been doing that for six months. They have a few in Estonia, a few in San Francisco, and a few in London. All demos. Starship reminds me of Better Place, the car battery swap company out of Israel. Too much PR, too many demos spread around the world, not enough profitable deployment. It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used.

tehlike 9y ago
shameless plug for battery swap on uavs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cUnNtTElaaVJWRDA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cUnNtTElaaVJWRDA... minutes 1:05 onwards. and this is from tesla: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event But seems like Tesla discontinued battery swapping in favor of superchargers.
emerongi 9y ago
There is a drone delivery system that is being developed right now. The plan is to install towers into buildings, where the drones can land and drop off the deliveries. You could potentially do your shopping at work, and then pick up your deliveries at the door once you come home (or have them delivered at your workplace). I'm much more excited for this than the robot.
- DrScump 9y ago
  In many areas, it won't stay at the door intact by the time you get home.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    But the roof would probably be fine, which is where the drones would drop the packages. Most package theft from what I can tell happens from strangers, not tenants, and tenants are probably the only people with roof access.

benevol 9y ago

The flip side of this movement is of course even better profiling and mass surveillance.

skeletal88 9y ago
The government already knows a lot about you, doesn't matter if you live in the US or Estonia or Germany. Having an ID number doesn't enable the government to spy even more on it's citizens. The ID card and id number make it safer than the alternatives.