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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 a

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.

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.