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I had to deal with public administration in the UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The UK one is probably the easiest to use. You can definitely see that there is an

I had to deal with public administration in the UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The UK one is probably the easiest to use. You can definitely see that there is an excellent team behind.

toyg 5y ago
There is one weakness, in my opinion, but it's not the service's fault as much as a national problem: identification is still messy. Whereas most continental administration have standardized on some sort of electronic-signature standard (which can be used to communicate safely and reliably as well as signing actual documents), the UK has not. The result is that the ID system is still excessively amenable to fraud and prone to problems identifying complex identities across all services. This seems to be a national issue though, akin to the rejection of ID cards.
- altacc 5y ago
  I moved from the UK to Scandinavia and there is a BankID system that allows you to authenticate yourself for any digital service, public or private, and it's amazing how useful that is. I work in financial services and the ability to correctly identify a new customer removes a bunch of problems that we'd have elsewhere. The flip side is that if you don't want this ID it becomes more difficult (but not impossible) to access any digital service. It also relies on an integrated public population register, which some people have problems with. But it's not a physical ID that you can be asked for or are required to have, so doesn't have the ideological & political issues of requiring a universal ID card.
  - GOATS- 5y ago
    I did the opposite move, from Scandinavia to the UK - it wasn't easy to adapt to the various identifications methods here like GOV.UK Verify and other platforms versus just using BankID everywhere. It was also weird seeing how every bank here has their own authentication method!
  - dariosalvi78 5y ago
    Italy has the SPID, Spain has ID cards with personal certificates since ages. I guess other countries have similar systems. The UK, with its reliance on "what is your date of birth" is the outlier really...
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  Agreed. In the UK with all the paranoia about IDs it's complicated. In Spain I got my first Https certificates (client side) in 2008 or even before. Their system are technically pretty cool, but UX is a mess. There is an initiative at EU level to have a common electronic ID, which would make a lot of sense, though probably not applicable to the UK.

I had to deal with public administration in the UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The UK one is probably the easiest to use. You can definitely see that there is an excellent team behind.

toyg 5y ago

There is one weakness, in my opinion, but it's not the service's fault as much as a national problem: identification is still messy. Whereas most continental administration have standardized on some sort of electronic-signature standard (which can be used to communicate safely and reliably as well as signing actual documents), the UK has not. The result is that the ID system is still excessively amenable to fraud and prone to problems identifying complex identities across all services. This seems to be a national issue though, akin to the rejection of ID cards.

altacc 5y ago
I moved from the UK to Scandinavia and there is a BankID system that allows you to authenticate yourself for any digital service, public or private, and it's amazing how useful that is. I work in financial services and the ability to correctly identify a new customer removes a bunch of problems that we'd have elsewhere. The flip side is that if you don't want this ID it becomes more difficult (but not impossible) to access any digital service. It also relies on an integrated public population register, which some people have problems with. But it's not a physical ID that you can be asked for or are required to have, so doesn't have the ideological & political issues of requiring a universal ID card.
- GOATS- 5y ago
  I did the opposite move, from Scandinavia to the UK - it wasn't easy to adapt to the various identifications methods here like GOV.UK Verify and other platforms versus just using BankID everywhere. It was also weird seeing how every bank here has their own authentication method!
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  Italy has the SPID, Spain has ID cards with personal certificates since ages. I guess other countries have similar systems. The UK, with its reliance on "what is your date of birth" is the outlier really...
dariosalvi78 5y ago
Agreed. In the UK with all the paranoia about IDs it's complicated. In Spain I got my first Https certificates (client side) in 2008 or even before. Their system are technically pretty cool, but UX is a mess. There is an initiative at EU level to have a common electronic ID, which would make a lot of sense, though probably not applicable to the UK.