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I recently moved to the UK from Denmark which has a national SSO solution. It feels like going back 10 years in time. The amount of times I've had to provide co

I recently moved to the UK from Denmark which has a national SSO solution. It feels like going back 10 years in time. The amount of times I've had to provide copies of my passport, drivers licences, council tax bills, credit card history, or other things to prove my identity/address is ridiculous.

ckolkey 5y ago
To be fair, I think Denmark is living 10+ years in the future with respect to that stuff. It's far more the exception than the rule :)
- kasperni 5y ago
  Point taken. What I will say though is that a national SSO solution is a great enabled for digital government. Having to go through a multi-day authentication phase just to access a particular service is such a barrier for adoption.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  Netherlands SSO (DigiD) isn't too bad either, on a stand alone basis. Onboarding could be improved I suppose which is an offline process but past that just about anything to do with the government is linked to it.
Phurist 5y ago
It's about priorities. Maintaining and managing millions of cameras is just more important perhaps.
calpaterson 5y ago
There was once a plan for a national identity database. It even got as far as pressing and distributing id cards but was repealed due to immense opposition. Just look at the list of supporters for the NO2ID campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID All parties except one (Labour - who probably would oppose it now), most trades unions, the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London Assembly, major charities, famous authors, the list goes on and on. So it will be driving licences and previous addresses forever I'm afraid!
- kasperni 5y ago
  It's not that I am in favour of centralisation. It's just that I prefer it over scattering my personal information over multiple parties.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    take a note from Italy! The SPID system[0] is based around multiple identity providers, which are all allowed to interoperate against the public login systems. You can have an account with identity provider X and use it to login to the regional health system, and at the same time have a separate account with provider Y and use it to authenticate with the pension system. Currently there are 21M users which is > 30% of the population. It's pretty nice. [0] https://www.spid.gov.it/ https://www.spid.gov.it/
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  As a French person, it feels incredibly weird to see how much opposition other countries have for a concept (a national id database) that we've had before the internet even existed. Looking into the details, I recently learned that the generalization of the national id dated from the Vichy regime, which... okay, yeah, I get why we might be alone in this. But in practice, it works pretty well, and with very few negative effects.
  - cromka 5y ago
    Same thing in Poland. Everyone always had an ID, now we have them with biometric info and RFID, which you can use by tapping it to your phone running an official app to log in to eGov portals. Very well executed in my humble opinion. I live in the States and when I show that to the locals, they cannot believe their eyes. eGov here is an absolute joke.
seibelj 5y ago
Denmark has a tiny population - 1.5% of the USA. I live in a small US state (Massachusetts) which itself has a larger population than Denmark. The country is over 90% white of European ancestry. The reason I say this is that getting an entire country to agree to support a government plan like a national ID tracker is much easier when the country is a monoculture with a population the size of a city.

ckolkey 5y ago

To be fair, I think Denmark is living 10+ years in the future with respect to that stuff. It's far more the exception than the rule :)

kasperni 5y ago
Point taken. What I will say though is that a national SSO solution is a great enabled for digital government. Having to go through a multi-day authentication phase just to access a particular service is such a barrier for adoption.
vishnugupta 5y ago
Netherlands SSO (DigiD) isn't too bad either, on a stand alone basis. Onboarding could be improved I suppose which is an offline process but past that just about anything to do with the government is linked to it.

Phurist 5y ago

It's about priorities. Maintaining and managing millions of cameras is just more important perhaps.

calpaterson 5y ago

There was once a plan for a national identity database. It even got as far as pressing and distributing id cards but was repealed due to immense opposition. Just look at the list of supporters for the NO2ID campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID All parties except one (Labour - who probably would oppose it now), most trades unions, the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London Assembly, major charities, famous authors, the list goes on and on. So it will be driving licences and previous addresses forever I'm afraid!

kasperni 5y ago
It's not that I am in favour of centralisation. It's just that I prefer it over scattering my personal information over multiple parties.
- riffraff 5y ago
  take a note from Italy! The SPID system[0] is based around multiple identity providers, which are all allowed to interoperate against the public login systems. You can have an account with identity provider X and use it to login to the regional health system, and at the same time have a separate account with provider Y and use it to authenticate with the pension system. Currently there are 21M users which is > 30% of the population. It's pretty nice. [0] https://www.spid.gov.it/ https://www.spid.gov.it/
PoignardAzur 5y ago
As a French person, it feels incredibly weird to see how much opposition other countries have for a concept (a national id database) that we've had before the internet even existed. Looking into the details, I recently learned that the generalization of the national id dated from the Vichy regime, which... okay, yeah, I get why we might be alone in this. But in practice, it works pretty well, and with very few negative effects.
- cromka 5y ago
  Same thing in Poland. Everyone always had an ID, now we have them with biometric info and RFID, which you can use by tapping it to your phone running an official app to log in to eGov portals. Very well executed in my humble opinion. I live in the States and when I show that to the locals, they cannot believe their eyes. eGov here is an absolute joke.

seibelj 5y ago

Denmark has a tiny population - 1.5% of the USA. I live in a small US state (Massachusetts) which itself has a larger population than Denmark. The country is over 90% white of European ancestry. The reason I say this is that getting an entire country to agree to support a government plan like a national ID tracker is much easier when the country is a monoculture with a population the size of a city.