18 ms·

The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

215 points by commitpizza 4y ago

vadiml 4y ago
IANAL but in EU the EU laws override member laws. So, since GDPR if you want your info to be removed you' ll be able to do it. Of course maybe you' ll need to go to EUCJ to acheive it
- ghusto 4y ago
  He says the Swedish government ignores GDPR complaints, because they're unconstitutional. I don't understand how that could work though. I mean, unless EU laws are like "You must follow these laws! Unless you don't want to".
  - soco 4y ago
    EU legislation is built into the constitution of EU members, so I'm not sure either what they are talking about.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    And he is wrong. GDPR is Swedish law, and governments take GDPR issues very seriously. Every community must by law have a GDPR compliance officer responsible for handling issues and reporting them to the government. There has been some quite public cases where government orgs, communities have been fined for GDPR violations. And these cases are of course also public so that can't be hidden.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    The GDPR has some carve-outs.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Member states often don't fully follow EU law. Yes, it's theoretically forbidden, but only the most extreme cases lead to repercussions.
- pelorat 4y ago
  EU laws does not override what's in an individual nation's constitution. National constitution > EU laws.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  Legitimacy of EU laws is based on international treaty establishing EU, so it depends on how international treaties are handled in constitutions of each country to see which level of legal power is assigned to them. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism_and_dualism_in_international_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism_and_dualism_in_internat...
noasaservice 4y ago
This sounds like it would be great for an embarrassment campaign of tracking all politicians and C-levels responsible for this. Basically, it's the elonjet all over again. If showing the data is legal, then highlighting specific datapoints should be as well.
- blodkorv 4y ago
  The ones responsible for this would not really care if you highlighted them.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    Yes, it is time we moved away from the idea that the politicians and captains of industry responsible for things we don't like can be embarrassed into changing their ways, if they had any shame they wouldn't be part of this in the first place.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    Actually they often do. It is not that uncommom that politicians, government workers etc quit or get fired when embarrasing things are exposed. Esp if it relates to making personal economic gains from the position one has.
    - potatototoo99 4y ago
      When it becomes common it stops being embarassing.
      - JoachimS 4y ago
        That would mean a society with rampant corruption. Sweden is quite far from that [0]. Given how fast people get sacked (leave their job to pursue a long time hobby) when being publicly caught and shamed, it is still very embarrassing. We just had a community where the newly elected politicians raised their salaries quite substantially, this while unions and employee organizations try to talk about keeping the pay raise low, not trying to compensate for the current (hopefully temporary) high inflation. It took basically a day before the suggested raise was pulled back and at least one politician dropped out. [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index
dcminter 4y ago
Almost as interesting, you can (as I understand it) look up the current salary of anyone you want to. Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so.
- diggan 4y ago
  They'd be notified that someone looked it up unless you buy the entire full set of data for the entire county / country, as it contains a bunch of people all together then. Also, in the notification they receive, only which service was used will be mentioned and not exactly who did it. So you can still lookup how much your co-workers earn without them knowing you asked for. But generally people are open with how much they earn, so it's really not an issue.
  - shafoshaf 4y ago
    If the US could do one thing for race relations, I feel this would be it.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      I feel like you are being a bit too optimistic in terms of what it would lead to. It definitely would do something to race relations, but perhaps not what you wanted, especially in the short term. Hint: it might end up leading to an uptick in antisemitism.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Buy, or, you know, just go to the library. (I did this after I moved here to check that I wasn’t being drastically underpaid compared to my colleagues. Turns out that I was.)
- dagw 4y ago
  Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so. There are companies that download the entire salary database and sell 'lookups' in their database. This way you can look up anyone you want and no one gets notified of anything.
erikrothoff 4y ago
As a Swede I love this openness. It puts everyone on an a level playing field and makes it much less dramatic and reduces the value of the data.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I don't think it reduces the value of data. It might reduce the acquisition cost, but not the value.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    If the acquisition cost is lower, the value will be lower because you don't need to factor in the acquisition cost.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      No, the value is what you can do with it. Now, if you want to sell the data, then having a competitor that offers it for free is reducing the value, but if you want to use the data, the value is independent of the cost.
      - erikrothoff 4y ago
        Yes, and if the data isn’t secret the number of things you can do with this data is limited. It’s like security by obscurity in reverse.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  One thing I like about living in a country of 330 million people is that the probability of being chosen for identity based malfeasance is lower Than in a country of 10 million
- DAVer98 4y ago
  Fine for you to say when your salary is probably north of 100K+. If Im on disability benefit? Do I want my land lord to know this? Or my friends? I guess I should just shout it as I walk down the street. Embaressment and being an easy target dont exist in your world being healthy i guess and you're lucky.
diggan 4y ago
I don't think this is true. You can apply for "Skyddade personuppgifter" (Protected personal data) which means your details won't be publicly viewable. Here is the documentation from the police: https://polisen.se/utsatt-for-brott/hjalp-och-stod-fran-samhallet/skyddade-personuppgifter/ https://polisen.se/utsatt-for-brott/hjalp-och-stod-fran-samh... and here is the details from the tax agency: https://www.skatteverket.se/foretagochorganisationer/myndigheter/informationsutbytemellanmyndigheter/folkbokforingsekretessmarkeradepersonuppgifter.4.18e1b10334ebe8bc80002541.html https://www.skatteverket.se/foretagochorganisationer/myndigh... I know bunch of other people who have protected identities who are not findable via the usual services, who applies for either "Skyddade personuppgifter" or "Sekretessmarkering". Details default to being public though, which the argument can be made both for and against it being a good idea. I love the idea that salaries are public on a national level, but less loving of the idea that everyone's address being public. At least there is some form of protection if you need it. I'm more worried about the national DNA database (PKU-registret - https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret) where literally every single citizen who been born in Sweden after 1975 is in. Seems usage by police and others are increasing while the purpose was suppose to be only for research.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  - diggan 4y ago
    The barrier to be accepted is very low. And there is another, lower "mark" as well called "Sekretessmarkering" ("Privacy mark") which can give you similar benefits and has even lower barrier. Or are you saying you did apply for this and it wasn't successful?
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      I'm not OP. But asking the government to give you back privacy seems the worst of all possible worlds. The people who need it the most are usually the people the Swedish government wants dead, e.g. Assange.
m_eiman 4y ago
"This system was built and created for a different time where criminality was pretty much absent in Sweden" When was this golden age of (almost) no crime, I wonder?
- yunohn 4y ago
  I’m sure this is alluding to the common anti-immigration sentiment, where all crime is blamed on refugees that are constantly othered and hated.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
  - rullelito 4y ago
- thrown_22 4y ago
  - u10 4y ago
    One, nobody thinks that, and two, a rather glib response to a rather complex satistical issue.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
  - Retric 4y ago
    Only if you compare wildly different statistics without context. During the years 2013-2017, Sweden averaged 64 reported rapes per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate that tied for the highest in Europe. However, when the data was examined, it became clear that Sweden's high numbers were fueled in large part by Sweden's broader definition of rape and more inclusive reporting rules compared to other European countries. When the data was recalculated using Germany's narrower guidelines, for example, Sweden's average reported rapes per 100,000 people fell from 64 to 15, a decrease of 326.7%.
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
If you think you are truly anonymous anywhere I've got a bridge to sell you.
rockbruno 4y ago
One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swedes don't think this is weird. Even if the country is overall safe I can think of a trillion ways in which you could ruin someone's life with this data.
- soco 4y ago
  The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.
    - tokai 4y ago
      Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.
      - growup66 4y ago
      - notch656a 4y ago
        Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.
apienx 4y ago
Freedom of expression is a big deal in Sweden. Tryckfrihetsförordningen (the other constitutional part besides Yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen) dates back to 1766. It's the oldest law ensuring freedom of the press and freedom of expression. Heja Sverige!
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Freedom of expression is actually relatively limited in Sweden, but freedom of the press is almost absurdly well protected. It's more about ensuring the dynamics between institutions than the liberties of individuals.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > Freedom of expression is actually relatively limited in Sweden I was curious about this so found https://www.riksdagen.se/en/how-the-riksdag-works/democracy/the-constitution/ https://www.riksdagen.se/en/how-the-riksdag-works/democracy/... In it they write: "In Sweden, you have the right to have an opinion on anything and say almost anything you want. You have the right to express yourself freely on the radio, TV and the Internet. The Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression sets out these rights. It also describes what is not permitted, for example defaming or publicly insulting another person." Being prevented from publicly insulting another person seems not only silly in principle, but impracticable.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Yeah, also noteworthy that the concept of defamation (förtal) is not limited to false statements. Even if the accusations you make are true, it may still potentially be illegal.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        > the concept of defamation (förtal) is not limited to false statements. This is the creepiest thing about a number of countries that claim to have freedom of speech as part of their constitution or laws. Instead of limiting defamation claims to false statements, they make defamation depend on a) the mental state of the accused defamer (did they intend to harm), b) the effect (usually financial) on the alleged defamed, or more likely an unholy combination of the two. The combination of the two results in, from a), a reliance on the fantasies of the court and law enforcement about other people's mental states (people they like didn't really mean it or didn't completely understand how it would be perceived, people they don't like are evil masterminds), and from b), the wealthier people are, the more dangerous they are to tell the truth about. a) obviously leads to a VIP justice system for elites and the politically connected. The funny thing about b) is that it's the perfect law to protect quacks and fraudsters, because they'll be the most provably harmed by truthful statements.
garaetjjte 4y ago
I'm confused, is the data coming from official government database itself or companies are just allowed to gather data coming from various random sources?
- dagw 4y ago
  Official government databases. Most official data in Sweden is default open.
yrgulation 4y ago
I knew a software engineer who used to live in sweden. One day he had a payraise. Out of the blue his landlord raised his rent. Apparently she somehow found out about his payraise and now i know how. She even told him that she knows he can afford more. He left sweden for this reason and racism. Before you believe all them nice stories about scandinavia, be sure to talk to people that lived in any of those countries as they all have some very disturbing practices.
- blodkorv 4y ago
  Landlords cant raise rent as they please in Sweden, the renting market and the amount of rent is controlled by the goverment.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    Or at least by the landlord and tenant organizations that establish rules and agreements with each other.
- flakeoil 4y ago
  A landlord in Sweden cannot increase the rent out of the blue. If there is a rental contract in place at least. If renting without a contract for some weird reason, well, you better be sure you rent from someone you trust. Like in most other countries I would expect.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    Probably raised at renewal. Deflecting the issue really doesnt help. My advice stands - people should exercise due diligence before moving to that country.
    - JoachimS 4y ago
      So it was at renewal, not out of the blue? Did the landlord actually mention the pay raise? One should always do as good due diligence as possible before doing a major change in life such as moving to another country. No matter which country it is.
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Overtonwindow 4y ago
Interesting! I remember reading that the Soviet Union did not have homelessness, because it was illegal to be homeless..
- betaby 4y ago
  Kind of, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Technically, it was illegal to be unemployed - i.e. 209th paragraph of USSR criminal code criminalizing living off of a 'parasitic way of life', such as a healthy work-capable person living for more than four months without socially useful labor through begging, vagrancy, etc.
FpUser 4y ago
>"You see, in Sweden all citizens are required to have a physical street address connected to your social security number." What about homeless?
- dottedmag 4y ago
  Homeless in Sweden? You'll be given a place to live in.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    And yet, https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-sweden/ https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-sweden/
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- m_eiman 4y ago
  I've heard that they're given the address of the local municipality main office, but I'm not sure how correct that is.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    Or possible relatives, friends. Churches and other organizations also help out.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  So there is a formal law stating that all citizens need (should, is expected to) have an address. But of course not everybody has an address registered. By choice or other reasons. If you don't it doesn't mean you get arrested, thrown in jail. It is just a requirement for a lot of things in the public services to work in general. The social services for example are pretty good at handling, solving issues like these when you are homeless.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mindslight 4y ago
We really need to get a handle on what privacy and anonymity mean. As someone who cares very much about privacy, this article just doesn't resonate with me. Thinking in terms of having some singular "identity" means you've already lost. The title of this post is straight up weird - "The only way of being anonymous is Sweden is illegal". That would imply that if you're walking down the street, anyone has the right to demand that you tell them your government identity? Or if you stop and talk to someone, at some point you need to tell them your government identity in case they're asked about it later? Obviously this is not the case. The article is really complaining about being able to map between (SSN, name, phone numbers, address). The same mappings exist in the US, and basically everywhere else, regardless of whether mandated de jure or not. To me, the primary concern is not about the existence of this mapping, but about having to spill your well known identifiers in the first place. If I can walk into a store and make a purchase without leaking my name, then the store cannot lookup my address or phone number. And they cannot track my purchases or return visit next week, which is a deeper form of privacy invasion that is generally missed when talking about this concept of singular government "identity". If I'm signing up for a web account and the website forces me to give my name, phone number, or address (especially in a way that they verify), then likewise I end up connected to my singular government identity just to use a web site. Meanwhile if there are laws prohibiting them from asking such information, or trying to figure it out from IP addresses etc, then I remain anonymous (psuedonymous) to the website regardless of the existence of the mapping of government identities. I roll my eyes every time I see some news article about a "personal information" leak that merely consists of mapping between well known government identifiers. Especially in the USian context, the more published social security and driving license numbers become, the better! The real concern is the tying of most of your every day behavior to any of those longstanding identifiers.
- eduction 4y ago
  Your comment raises some really good points, one of which is that address information is actually public information. It is interesting to me how in the last say 30 years this information, which used to be just considered a basic fact, has become highly sensitized. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But consider that virtually all municipalities make property records public by default, which was historically as a matter of public interest. Historically they made voter registration records public as well (this now varies by locality or state) which covers renters. If you think about it, it didn't used to be very practical to keep your address highly private because so much information came by mail, so you'd end up sharing your address more widely with friends but even acquaintances. Without mobile phones it could be onerous to set up a meeting away from home if there was any likelihood it would need to be rescheduled at the last second. I believe (with no hard evidence) that "swing by my place and we'll go from there" used to be much more common, by necessity. It was routine for personal home addresses to be listed with the name of the occupant in widely distributed phone books. You could opt out of this by the time I was a kid. These days it might be considered doxing for a company to disseminate this information by default! I do not think we should have to keep those norms forever, of course, but if we are going to start treating addresses as highly privileged maybe we should more intentional and methodical about it. It would mean trying to answer the question of "how do we preserve the public interest in knowing who owns a piece of land in a municipality, particularly when there is a complaint, an environmental concern, a tax policy question that is hard to answer without knowing who owns all the land in an area, etc." Another good point you make is that SSNs are dangerous not in and of themselves but because of how they can be used. Like you said, they can be cross referenced if overcollected to build tracking profiles. But also, in the U.S., they have been improperly overloaded as an authentication token, so they have been made dangerous by misuse. But ideally we'd have a system where there is little/no danger in having your SSN exposed.
iveqy 4y ago
I was biking in the northern Sweden and stopping by a restaurant. I left my luggage on my unlocked bike outside while going in for lunch for an hour. Nothing strange about that, why would anyone steal a bike? Noone locked their bikes! Instead of saying openess is bad, let's say what kind of society you would like to live in and then work towards it. Personally I would rather not have a bike lock, nor door lock.
- CapitalTntcls 4y ago
  Try doing that in Malmö.
- null_object 4y ago
  > Noone locked their bikes! Wow this is a surreal comment. More than 65,000 bikes are reported stolen each year in Sweden [0] - but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as a stolen bike is so common that hardly anyone even bothers reporting it. [0] https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykelstold.html https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykel...
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also that actually reporting it stolen is useless. Unless you need to claim insurance, or have the number of chasis somewhere. Police won't do anything about stolen bikes.
    - 3836293648 4y ago
      That's not true. I reported my bike stolen and got it back. ~~Has nothing to do with that they found it when arresting the thief for something completely different~~
betaby 4y ago
I remember someone told me that Swede has open tax record as well. Is it the case?
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  Yes, everyone’s final tax payments are published each year.
ghusto 4y ago
Initial reaction: WTF?! The more I think about it though, the more I'm aligned with the idea — except the home address part, that's just mental and dangerous. So all your details like salary, social security number, etc. are public. What's the end result? For me, nothing. I _could_ care less, but not by much. I know people get all worked up about things like their social security number being exposed, "because fraud!", but really? How? They'd go somewhere and try to open a bank account or something with your details? Without an government approved ID? On the other hand, I can see a lot of good coming from this level of transparency. So much crap is possible due to secrecy being the norm. It's like how at work you're expected not to share your salary with co-workers, but the C-levels know how much you get paid. Same thing in society; we're expected not to share information with each other, but the government knows everything. Put it all out in the open and let's see what floats.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > So all your details like salary, social security number, etc. are public. What's the end result? For me, nothing. I _could_ care less, but not by much. I'm pretty sure my antisocial neighbor would consider robbing me if he knew my net worth.
  - ojn 4y ago
    Net worth is not public, "only" your taxable income.
- exodust 4y ago
  > I can see a lot of good coming from this... Yet you don't name one single thing except that "bad things are possible" without it. I'm quite sure bad things are possible with or without everyone's personal data in a public lookup service.
- hiccuphippo 4y ago
  > I know people get all worked up about things like their social security number being exposed, "because fraud!", but really? How? They'd go somewhere and try to open a bank account or something with your details? Without an government approved ID? Yes, at least in my country knowing your ID/SSN does nothing. It is crazy that someone could open an account with the number alone.
keskival 4y ago
Anonymity is not the same as not having a public address associated to your name. One can well be anonymous in numerous different contexts even with the above mentioned data available publicly.
null_object 4y ago
It can hardly be said to benefit 'ordinary people' that anyone can find out a person's home address, birthday, salary, workplace, the size of their home, their family, children, and so on. These databases are generally available not to benefit 'freedom of expression', but so that neighbors can easily spy on each other, or the newspapers can print-on-demand lists of "The richest people in YOUR area!". Whatever else, the truly richest people have fixed the system so that their wealth isn't accessible in an online database. Aside from the fact that Sweden is the most opinion-conformist country I've ever lived in (so that 'freedom of the press' is farcical at the best of times), when it comes to true freedom of speech the police will crush it mercilessly: literally shooting people in the streets, followed by kangaroo courts that rubber-stamp fake police evidence to convict peaceful protesters with draconian sentences.[1] Governments, police and the authorities are all protected by extensive secrecy. It's only the ordinary 'sucker' who has the 'freedom' of exposing all their most private affairs for everyone to pry. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna (in Swedish) PS: for once the multiple downvotes are themselves an artifact of the discussion- I'm betting from affronted Swedes lol - because being negative about Sweden isn't allowed to be stated. But Swedes are all very proud of freedom of expression
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jacooper 4y ago
I feel this weirdly common in Scandinavian countries for some reason. Maybe their society lived in this "everything is peaceful and we have no corruption so nothing bad happens" long enough to have such an absurd level of trust in the government?
- bjornsing 4y ago
  That’s the positive angle. But I think you could argue that the real reason is that we never had any popular uprising against absolute monarchy. So the Nordic countries are stuck in a pre-Magna Carta (or French revolution or American revolution) culture.
  - kridsdale2 4y ago
    I'm presently nearly done reading (fiction) The Long Ships about this region 1022 years ago. I'm enjoying seeing how cultural attitudes that took root in the transition from a bunch of guys doing whatever they wanted, and everyone can be a king as long as they can murder would-be-murderers well enough, to accepting a (supposed) life of peace as followers of Christ. It makes me want to understand the subsequent 1000 years of history to see how they became as they are now.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      What I enjoyed about the Long Ships is how the author avoided moral handholding and let the reader make their own appreciation of it. Interestingly, the contrast highlights the concept of master vs. slave morality pretty well. The Vikings see strength as the ultimate determinator and servitude as the appropriate result of weakness. Insofar as they have rules surrounding honor or other meta/legal considerations, these are there to facilitate the resolution of power struggles through duels or other such concepts. They nonetheless have a fairly stable civilization. And of course Christianity is the canonical (no pun intended) example of slave morality as identified by Nietzsche.
megous 4y ago
> This means that if you as a private individual writes and request removal of the data according to the GDPR (or the swedish implementation of it, Dataskyddsförordningen) it will promptly be ignored since these companies all “act in the interest of society” (Utgivningsbevis) basically. Not sure about Sweden, but I got data removed from very many such websites via objection to processing of my data (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/) (instead of request for removal). If the company doesn't find some strong legal basis that would override my objection, they have to remove the data. "Interest of society" doesn't cut it[1], since that's satisfied by the data being publicly available from official sources in the most uptodate and non-confusing manner. (that source is just not indexed in search engines) So there's that. So now if someone searches my name, they'll find my contributions to linux kernel, and other sensible things, instead of 3 pages of these garbage SEO spamming nonsense cloned from public registers. They'd really have to push it to find legal basis for overriding objection to listing random, often outdated and misleading info on their SEO spaming websites and misdirecting public from official sources. Usually they just remove the info. If they resist, I just point them to my local's DPA cases where similar companies were fined for the same thing. Easy. :) [1] The whole point of that article is to override art. 6 1e/1f provisions for public interest in some cases.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
One upside of everyone's name, date of birth, address and personal ID number being public knowledge in Sweden is that organisations don't treat knowing any of those as proof of your identity. It's absurd how that's not the case in other places.
- daenney 4y ago
  This is a really nice benefit. It honestly was weird coming from a country where knowing the social security number alone lets you take over someone's life and as such is highly regulated and locked down. The first time a random site prompted me for my personnummer I had a heart attack. But once you adjust to it for a second, it's quite nice. My personnummer is public info, and that's fine. With just that number alone, you can't do jack shit. Everywhere it's used online requires you to confirm/sign an action with BankID, or requires a valid ID and physical presence IRL. That's not to say it's impossible to social engineer your way into getting a BankID issued to you for your victim, but it's on the level of "getting someone's social security number" in other countries hard. Any site using BankID for auth doesn't get access to the cert so they can't leak it, and you can revoke your BankID for individual authenticators (like your phone) which you can't do with an SSN.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    > . It honestly was weird coming from a country where knowing the social security number alone lets you take over someone's life and as such is highly regulated and locked down I guess that's better than the US where the SSN can take over someone's life and is completely unregulated and not at all locked down
- cinntaile 4y ago
  They most certainly treat knowing your personal ID as proof of your identity in plenty of cases. One example... People can change other people's addresses without any real proof, you need to opt-in at the tax agency so that you need an eID to do this. The tax agency explicitly mentions this on their website. https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inenglish/individualsandemployees/reportingachangeofaddress.4.5c1163881590be297b51920b.html https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inengli...
codedokode 4y ago
There is not much good in making the data public. For example, information about salary helps scammers to pick "fat" victims. A perfect victim is someone in their 60s-70s who had a good salary once and probably has savings. The crime rate might be low in Sweden but this information can be used by foreign scammers. Also this information can be useful for foreign spies (for example to find employees of companies doing work for defence).
edm0nd 4y ago
Seems like a great idea to apply misinformation to everything so that the data they list is inaccurate.
pmontra 4y ago
"the laws do not apply if they contravenes the constitution" Isn't the EU based on the primacy of EU laws over local ones? The Sweden constitution should have been amended long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law "The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself"
- PeterisP 4y ago
  There's no issue of primacy between laws as GDPR explicitly states that processing of private data which is required by some local law is legitimate. GDPR does apply to state and municipal institutions, requiring them to have a legal basis for processing private data, however, local laws can grant that legal basis and GDPR would not dispute it.
xoffeemuffins23 4y ago
Also a bit remarkable is that your social security number (personnummer) is not only used to identify you with official and government services, but also with every company you might have a customer account with. It consists of your birthdate and 4 numbers (which some people use as their pin code on their devices). On the other hand there's 2FA: when identifying to a service (like when calling customer support) you're asked for your personnummer, after which you have to open an app on your smartphone to verify with a 6 digit pin code. The trust in eachother went pretty far apparently, where garage sales sometimes just meant an open barn with a notice. Things for sale would have the price + an account number to make the payment to. (But haven't come across this myself yet, times are changing)
uri4 4y ago
» The short answer is that the only legal way is to apply for protected identity ... since it requires your life to be threatened Relatively simple way to get protected identity is to cross certain religion. Become apostate, publish nasty comics etc.. There were some nasty cases and police provides some level of protection, without too much questioning. Don't ask me for details.
hairofadog 4y ago
I was thinking this morning about how strange it was that in the U.S., in the old days of phone books, you had to pay to be unlisted otherwise they'd just publish your phone number and address right there in the white pages. Contrast to today when you can't pay to be unlisted but you do have the option to join a class action lawsuit against Equifax after they oops your social security number onto the dark web.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  we used to live in a significantly higher-trust society
  - psychlops 4y ago
    I wouldn't say that so much as people had to physically go somewhere to use the stolen information. The possible damage was local and limited.
    - club_tropical 4y ago
      No, this assumes all people have the same baseline tendency to abuse trust and commit fraud. You would then expect the remote scammers of, say, Maine pensioners to be from Alabama or Germany with the same rate (adjusted for population size) as from India, China, etc. This is not the case; your risk not equally distributed among all remote locations.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    We used to also live in an environment where it was far harder to scale the misuse of information and profit from that misuse.
erk__ 4y ago
We have mostly the same in Denmark, though it is possible to apply for non-disclosure of name and address online [0] if you want to stay more private. I have spoken with expats who were rather surprised by it, but most danes don't really think too much about it. Similarly if you have a .dk domain your address must be listed on the whois. It should be noted that non-disclosure of name and address goes further, for example it was possible to see if anyone had it in the online system my university used because they would show up as their student id instead of their name in the interface. [0]: https://international.kk.dk/live/housing/moving-to-a-new-place/non-disclosure-of-name-and-address https://international.kk.dk/live/housing/moving-to-a-new-pla...
astrolx 4y ago
Actually, you can get removed from most of these websites rather simply, either by logging in with BankID and select that option, or by sending an angry email.
amai 4y ago
I'm sure also in Sweden nobody can figure out where the products you buy on Amazon are really produced or where a company is really paying taxes (if any). People have no right for privacy, but we allow companies and their products to be as anonymous as it gets. Find the mistake!

215 points by commitpizza 4y ago

IANAL but in EU the EU laws override member laws. So, since GDPR if you want your info to be removed you' ll be able to do it. Of course maybe you' ll need to go to EUCJ to acheive it

ghusto 4y ago
He says the Swedish government ignores GDPR complaints, because they're unconstitutional. I don't understand how that could work though. I mean, unless EU laws are like "You must follow these laws! Unless you don't want to".
- soco 4y ago
  EU legislation is built into the constitution of EU members, so I'm not sure either what they are talking about.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  And he is wrong. GDPR is Swedish law, and governments take GDPR issues very seriously. Every community must by law have a GDPR compliance officer responsible for handling issues and reporting them to the government. There has been some quite public cases where government orgs, communities have been fined for GDPR violations. And these cases are of course also public so that can't be hidden.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  The GDPR has some carve-outs.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Member states often don't fully follow EU law. Yes, it's theoretically forbidden, but only the most extreme cases lead to repercussions.
pelorat 4y ago
EU laws does not override what's in an individual nation's constitution. National constitution > EU laws.
zajio1am 4y ago
Legitimacy of EU laws is based on international treaty establishing EU, so it depends on how international treaties are handled in constitutions of each country to see which level of legal power is assigned to them. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism_and_dualism_in_international_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism_and_dualism_in_internat...

noasaservice 4y ago

This sounds like it would be great for an embarrassment campaign of tracking all politicians and C-levels responsible for this. Basically, it's the elonjet all over again. If showing the data is legal, then highlighting specific datapoints should be as well.

blodkorv 4y ago
The ones responsible for this would not really care if you highlighted them.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Yes, it is time we moved away from the idea that the politicians and captains of industry responsible for things we don't like can be embarrassed into changing their ways, if they had any shame they wouldn't be part of this in the first place.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  Actually they often do. It is not that uncommom that politicians, government workers etc quit or get fired when embarrasing things are exposed. Esp if it relates to making personal economic gains from the position one has.
  - potatototoo99 4y ago
    When it becomes common it stops being embarassing.
    - JoachimS 4y ago
      That would mean a society with rampant corruption. Sweden is quite far from that [0]. Given how fast people get sacked (leave their job to pursue a long time hobby) when being publicly caught and shamed, it is still very embarrassing. We just had a community where the newly elected politicians raised their salaries quite substantially, this while unions and employee organizations try to talk about keeping the pay raise low, not trying to compensate for the current (hopefully temporary) high inflation. It took basically a day before the suggested raise was pulled back and at least one politician dropped out. [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index

dcminter 4y ago

Almost as interesting, you can (as I understand it) look up the current salary of anyone you want to. Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so.

diggan 4y ago
They'd be notified that someone looked it up unless you buy the entire full set of data for the entire county / country, as it contains a bunch of people all together then. Also, in the notification they receive, only which service was used will be mentioned and not exactly who did it. So you can still lookup how much your co-workers earn without them knowing you asked for. But generally people are open with how much they earn, so it's really not an issue.
- shafoshaf 4y ago
  If the US could do one thing for race relations, I feel this would be it.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    I feel like you are being a bit too optimistic in terms of what it would lead to. It definitely would do something to race relations, but perhaps not what you wanted, especially in the short term. Hint: it might end up leading to an uptick in antisemitism.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Buy, or, you know, just go to the library. (I did this after I moved here to check that I wasn’t being drastically underpaid compared to my colleagues. Turns out that I was.)
dagw 4y ago
Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so. There are companies that download the entire salary database and sell 'lookups' in their database. This way you can look up anyone you want and no one gets notified of anything.

erikrothoff 4y ago

As a Swede I love this openness. It puts everyone on an a level playing field and makes it much less dramatic and reduces the value of the data.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I don't think it reduces the value of data. It might reduce the acquisition cost, but not the value.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  If the acquisition cost is lower, the value will be lower because you don't need to factor in the acquisition cost.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    No, the value is what you can do with it. Now, if you want to sell the data, then having a competitor that offers it for free is reducing the value, but if you want to use the data, the value is independent of the cost.
    - erikrothoff 4y ago
      Yes, and if the data isn’t secret the number of things you can do with this data is limited. It’s like security by obscurity in reverse.
yieldcrv 4y ago
One thing I like about living in a country of 330 million people is that the probability of being chosen for identity based malfeasance is lower Than in a country of 10 million
DAVer98 4y ago
Fine for you to say when your salary is probably north of 100K+. If Im on disability benefit? Do I want my land lord to know this? Or my friends? I guess I should just shout it as I walk down the street. Embaressment and being an easy target dont exist in your world being healthy i guess and you're lucky.

diggan 4y ago

I don't think this is true. You can apply for "Skyddade personuppgifter" (Protected personal data) which means your details won't be publicly viewable. Here is the documentation from the police: https://polisen.se/utsatt-for-brott/hjalp-och-stod-fran-samhallet/skyddade-personuppgifter/ https://polisen.se/utsatt-for-brott/hjalp-och-stod-fran-samh... and here is the details from the tax agency: https://www.skatteverket.se/foretagochorganisationer/myndigheter/informationsutbytemellanmyndigheter/folkbokforingsekretessmarkeradepersonuppgifter.4.18e1b10334ebe8bc80002541.html https://www.skatteverket.se/foretagochorganisationer/myndigh... I know bunch of other people who have protected identities who are not findable via the usual services, who applies for either "Skyddade personuppgifter" or "Sekretessmarkering". Details default to being public though, which the argument can be made both for and against it being a good idea. I love the idea that salaries are public on a national level, but less loving of the idea that everyone's address being public. At least there is some form of protection if you need it. I'm more worried about the national DNA database (PKU-registret - https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKU-registret) where literally every single citizen who been born in Sweden after 1975 is in. Seems usage by police and others are increasing while the purpose was suppose to be only for research.

thrown_22 4y ago
- diggan 4y ago
  The barrier to be accepted is very low. And there is another, lower "mark" as well called "Sekretessmarkering" ("Privacy mark") which can give you similar benefits and has even lower barrier. Or are you saying you did apply for this and it wasn't successful?
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    I'm not OP. But asking the government to give you back privacy seems the worst of all possible worlds. The people who need it the most are usually the people the Swedish government wants dead, e.g. Assange.

m_eiman 4y ago

"This system was built and created for a different time where criminality was pretty much absent in Sweden" When was this golden age of (almost) no crime, I wonder?

yunohn 4y ago
I’m sure this is alluding to the common anti-immigration sentiment, where all crime is blamed on refugees that are constantly othered and hated.
- thrown_22 4y ago
- rullelito 4y ago
thrown_22 4y ago
- u10 4y ago
  One, nobody thinks that, and two, a rather glib response to a rather complex satistical issue.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
- Retric 4y ago
  Only if you compare wildly different statistics without context. During the years 2013-2017, Sweden averaged 64 reported rapes per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate that tied for the highest in Europe. However, when the data was examined, it became clear that Sweden's high numbers were fueled in large part by Sweden's broader definition of rape and more inclusive reporting rules compared to other European countries. When the data was recalculated using Germany's narrower guidelines, for example, Sweden's average reported rapes per 100,000 people fell from 64 to 15, a decrease of 326.7%.

cosmiccatnap 4y ago

If you think you are truly anonymous anywhere I've got a bridge to sell you.

rockbruno 4y ago

One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swedes don't think this is weird. Even if the country is overall safe I can think of a trillion ways in which you could ruin someone's life with this data.

soco 4y ago
The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.
  - tokai 4y ago
    Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.
    - growup66 4y ago
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.

apienx 4y ago

Freedom of expression is a big deal in Sweden. Tryckfrihetsförordningen (the other constitutional part besides Yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen) dates back to 1766. It's the oldest law ensuring freedom of the press and freedom of expression. Heja Sverige!

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Freedom of expression is actually relatively limited in Sweden, but freedom of the press is almost absurdly well protected. It's more about ensuring the dynamics between institutions than the liberties of individuals.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Freedom of expression is actually relatively limited in Sweden I was curious about this so found https://www.riksdagen.se/en/how-the-riksdag-works/democracy/the-constitution/ https://www.riksdagen.se/en/how-the-riksdag-works/democracy/... In it they write: "In Sweden, you have the right to have an opinion on anything and say almost anything you want. You have the right to express yourself freely on the radio, TV and the Internet. The Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression sets out these rights. It also describes what is not permitted, for example defaming or publicly insulting another person." Being prevented from publicly insulting another person seems not only silly in principle, but impracticable.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Yeah, also noteworthy that the concept of defamation (förtal) is not limited to false statements. Even if the accusations you make are true, it may still potentially be illegal.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      > the concept of defamation (förtal) is not limited to false statements. This is the creepiest thing about a number of countries that claim to have freedom of speech as part of their constitution or laws. Instead of limiting defamation claims to false statements, they make defamation depend on a) the mental state of the accused defamer (did they intend to harm), b) the effect (usually financial) on the alleged defamed, or more likely an unholy combination of the two. The combination of the two results in, from a), a reliance on the fantasies of the court and law enforcement about other people's mental states (people they like didn't really mean it or didn't completely understand how it would be perceived, people they don't like are evil masterminds), and from b), the wealthier people are, the more dangerous they are to tell the truth about. a) obviously leads to a VIP justice system for elites and the politically connected. The funny thing about b) is that it's the perfect law to protect quacks and fraudsters, because they'll be the most provably harmed by truthful statements.

garaetjjte 4y ago

I'm confused, is the data coming from official government database itself or companies are just allowed to gather data coming from various random sources?

dagw 4y ago
Official government databases. Most official data in Sweden is default open.

yrgulation 4y ago

I knew a software engineer who used to live in sweden. One day he had a payraise. Out of the blue his landlord raised his rent. Apparently she somehow found out about his payraise and now i know how. She even told him that she knows he can afford more. He left sweden for this reason and racism. Before you believe all them nice stories about scandinavia, be sure to talk to people that lived in any of those countries as they all have some very disturbing practices.

blodkorv 4y ago
Landlords cant raise rent as they please in Sweden, the renting market and the amount of rent is controlled by the goverment.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  Or at least by the landlord and tenant organizations that establish rules and agreements with each other.
flakeoil 4y ago
A landlord in Sweden cannot increase the rent out of the blue. If there is a rental contract in place at least. If renting without a contract for some weird reason, well, you better be sure you rent from someone you trust. Like in most other countries I would expect.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Probably raised at renewal. Deflecting the issue really doesnt help. My advice stands - people should exercise due diligence before moving to that country.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    So it was at renewal, not out of the blue? Did the landlord actually mention the pay raise? One should always do as good due diligence as possible before doing a major change in life such as moving to another country. No matter which country it is.

deleted 4y ago

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Overtonwindow 4y ago

Interesting! I remember reading that the Soviet Union did not have homelessness, because it was illegal to be homeless..

betaby 4y ago
Kind of, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre
PeterisP 4y ago
Technically, it was illegal to be unemployed - i.e. 209th paragraph of USSR criminal code criminalizing living off of a 'parasitic way of life', such as a healthy work-capable person living for more than four months without socially useful labor through begging, vagrancy, etc.

FpUser 4y ago

>"You see, in Sweden all citizens are required to have a physical street address connected to your social security number." What about homeless?

dottedmag 4y ago
Homeless in Sweden? You'll be given a place to live in.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  And yet, https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-sweden/ https://borgenproject.org/homelessness-in-sweden/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
m_eiman 4y ago
I've heard that they're given the address of the local municipality main office, but I'm not sure how correct that is.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  Or possible relatives, friends. Churches and other organizations also help out.
JoachimS 4y ago
So there is a formal law stating that all citizens need (should, is expected to) have an address. But of course not everybody has an address registered. By choice or other reasons. If you don't it doesn't mean you get arrested, thrown in jail. It is just a requirement for a lot of things in the public services to work in general. The social services for example are pretty good at handling, solving issues like these when you are homeless.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mindslight 4y ago

We really need to get a handle on what privacy and anonymity mean. As someone who cares very much about privacy, this article just doesn't resonate with me. Thinking in terms of having some singular "identity" means you've already lost. The title of this post is straight up weird - "The only way of being anonymous is Sweden is illegal". That would imply that if you're walking down the street, anyone has the right to demand that you tell them your government identity? Or if you stop and talk to someone, at some point you need to tell them your government identity in case they're asked about it later? Obviously this is not the case. The article is really complaining about being able to map between (SSN, name, phone numbers, address). The same mappings exist in the US, and basically everywhere else, regardless of whether mandated de jure or not. To me, the primary concern is not about the existence of this mapping, but about having to spill your well known identifiers in the first place. If I can walk into a store and make a purchase without leaking my name, then the store cannot lookup my address or phone number. And they cannot track my purchases or return visit next week, which is a deeper form of privacy invasion that is generally missed when talking about this concept of singular government "identity". If I'm signing up for a web account and the website forces me to give my name, phone number, or address (especially in a way that they verify), then likewise I end up connected to my singular government identity just to use a web site. Meanwhile if there are laws prohibiting them from asking such information, or trying to figure it out from IP addresses etc, then I remain anonymous (psuedonymous) to the website regardless of the existence of the mapping of government identities. I roll my eyes every time I see some news article about a "personal information" leak that merely consists of mapping between well known government identifiers. Especially in the USian context, the more published social security and driving license numbers become, the better! The real concern is the tying of most of your every day behavior to any of those longstanding identifiers.

eduction 4y ago
Your comment raises some really good points, one of which is that address information is actually public information. It is interesting to me how in the last say 30 years this information, which used to be just considered a basic fact, has become highly sensitized. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But consider that virtually all municipalities make property records public by default, which was historically as a matter of public interest. Historically they made voter registration records public as well (this now varies by locality or state) which covers renters. If you think about it, it didn't used to be very practical to keep your address highly private because so much information came by mail, so you'd end up sharing your address more widely with friends but even acquaintances. Without mobile phones it could be onerous to set up a meeting away from home if there was any likelihood it would need to be rescheduled at the last second. I believe (with no hard evidence) that "swing by my place and we'll go from there" used to be much more common, by necessity. It was routine for personal home addresses to be listed with the name of the occupant in widely distributed phone books. You could opt out of this by the time I was a kid. These days it might be considered doxing for a company to disseminate this information by default! I do not think we should have to keep those norms forever, of course, but if we are going to start treating addresses as highly privileged maybe we should more intentional and methodical about it. It would mean trying to answer the question of "how do we preserve the public interest in knowing who owns a piece of land in a municipality, particularly when there is a complaint, an environmental concern, a tax policy question that is hard to answer without knowing who owns all the land in an area, etc." Another good point you make is that SSNs are dangerous not in and of themselves but because of how they can be used. Like you said, they can be cross referenced if overcollected to build tracking profiles. But also, in the U.S., they have been improperly overloaded as an authentication token, so they have been made dangerous by misuse. But ideally we'd have a system where there is little/no danger in having your SSN exposed.

iveqy 4y ago

I was biking in the northern Sweden and stopping by a restaurant. I left my luggage on my unlocked bike outside while going in for lunch for an hour. Nothing strange about that, why would anyone steal a bike? Noone locked their bikes! Instead of saying openess is bad, let's say what kind of society you would like to live in and then work towards it. Personally I would rather not have a bike lock, nor door lock.

CapitalTntcls 4y ago
Try doing that in Malmö.
null_object 4y ago
> Noone locked their bikes! Wow this is a surreal comment. More than 65,000 bikes are reported stolen each year in Sweden [0] - but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as a stolen bike is so common that hardly anyone even bothers reporting it. [0] https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykelstold.html https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran-brottstyper/cykel...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also that actually reporting it stolen is useless. Unless you need to claim insurance, or have the number of chasis somewhere. Police won't do anything about stolen bikes.
  - 3836293648 4y ago
    That's not true. I reported my bike stolen and got it back. ~~Has nothing to do with that they found it when arresting the thief for something completely different~~

betaby 4y ago

I remember someone told me that Swede has open tax record as well. Is it the case?

brtkdotse 4y ago
Yes, everyone’s final tax payments are published each year.

ghusto 4y ago

Initial reaction: WTF?! The more I think about it though, the more I'm aligned with the idea — except the home address part, that's just mental and dangerous. So all your details like salary, social security number, etc. are public. What's the end result? For me, nothing. I _could_ care less, but not by much. I know people get all worked up about things like their social security number being exposed, "because fraud!", but really? How? They'd go somewhere and try to open a bank account or something with your details? Without an government approved ID? On the other hand, I can see a lot of good coming from this level of transparency. So much crap is possible due to secrecy being the norm. It's like how at work you're expected not to share your salary with co-workers, but the C-levels know how much you get paid. Same thing in society; we're expected not to share information with each other, but the government knows everything. Put it all out in the open and let's see what floats.

luckylion 4y ago
> So all your details like salary, social security number, etc. are public. What's the end result? For me, nothing. I _could_ care less, but not by much. I'm pretty sure my antisocial neighbor would consider robbing me if he knew my net worth.
- ojn 4y ago
  Net worth is not public, "only" your taxable income.
exodust 4y ago
> I can see a lot of good coming from this... Yet you don't name one single thing except that "bad things are possible" without it. I'm quite sure bad things are possible with or without everyone's personal data in a public lookup service.
hiccuphippo 4y ago
> I know people get all worked up about things like their social security number being exposed, "because fraud!", but really? How? They'd go somewhere and try to open a bank account or something with your details? Without an government approved ID? Yes, at least in my country knowing your ID/SSN does nothing. It is crazy that someone could open an account with the number alone.

keskival 4y ago

Anonymity is not the same as not having a public address associated to your name. One can well be anonymous in numerous different contexts even with the above mentioned data available publicly.

null_object 4y ago

It can hardly be said to benefit 'ordinary people' that anyone can find out a person's home address, birthday, salary, workplace, the size of their home, their family, children, and so on. These databases are generally available not to benefit 'freedom of expression', but so that neighbors can easily spy on each other, or the newspapers can print-on-demand lists of "The richest people in YOUR area!". Whatever else, the truly richest people have fixed the system so that their wealth isn't accessible in an online database. Aside from the fact that Sweden is the most opinion-conformist country I've ever lived in (so that 'freedom of the press' is farcical at the best of times), when it comes to true freedom of speech the police will crush it mercilessly: literally shooting people in the streets, followed by kangaroo courts that rubber-stamp fake police evidence to convict peaceful protesters with draconian sentences.[1] Governments, police and the authorities are all protected by extensive secrecy. It's only the ordinary 'sucker' who has the 'freedom' of exposing all their most private affairs for everyone to pry. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göteborgskravallerna (in Swedish) PS: for once the multiple downvotes are themselves an artifact of the discussion- I'm betting from affronted Swedes lol - because being negative about Sweden isn't allowed to be stated. But Swedes are all very proud of freedom of expression

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jacooper 4y ago

I feel this weirdly common in Scandinavian countries for some reason. Maybe their society lived in this "everything is peaceful and we have no corruption so nothing bad happens" long enough to have such an absurd level of trust in the government?

bjornsing 4y ago
That’s the positive angle. But I think you could argue that the real reason is that we never had any popular uprising against absolute monarchy. So the Nordic countries are stuck in a pre-Magna Carta (or French revolution or American revolution) culture.
- kridsdale2 4y ago
  I'm presently nearly done reading (fiction) The Long Ships about this region 1022 years ago. I'm enjoying seeing how cultural attitudes that took root in the transition from a bunch of guys doing whatever they wanted, and everyone can be a king as long as they can murder would-be-murderers well enough, to accepting a (supposed) life of peace as followers of Christ. It makes me want to understand the subsequent 1000 years of history to see how they became as they are now.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    What I enjoyed about the Long Ships is how the author avoided moral handholding and let the reader make their own appreciation of it. Interestingly, the contrast highlights the concept of master vs. slave morality pretty well. The Vikings see strength as the ultimate determinator and servitude as the appropriate result of weakness. Insofar as they have rules surrounding honor or other meta/legal considerations, these are there to facilitate the resolution of power struggles through duels or other such concepts. They nonetheless have a fairly stable civilization. And of course Christianity is the canonical (no pun intended) example of slave morality as identified by Nietzsche.

megous 4y ago

> This means that if you as a private individual writes and request removal of the data according to the GDPR (or the swedish implementation of it, Dataskyddsförordningen) it will promptly be ignored since these companies all “act in the interest of society” (Utgivningsbevis) basically. Not sure about Sweden, but I got data removed from very many such websites via objection to processing of my data (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/) (instead of request for removal). If the company doesn't find some strong legal basis that would override my objection, they have to remove the data. "Interest of society" doesn't cut it[1], since that's satisfied by the data being publicly available from official sources in the most uptodate and non-confusing manner. (that source is just not indexed in search engines) So there's that. So now if someone searches my name, they'll find my contributions to linux kernel, and other sensible things, instead of 3 pages of these garbage SEO spamming nonsense cloned from public registers. They'd really have to push it to find legal basis for overriding objection to listing random, often outdated and misleading info on their SEO spaming websites and misdirecting public from official sources. Usually they just remove the info. If they resist, I just point them to my local's DPA cases where similar companies were fined for the same thing. Easy. :) [1] The whole point of that article is to override art. 6 1e/1f provisions for public interest in some cases.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

One upside of everyone's name, date of birth, address and personal ID number being public knowledge in Sweden is that organisations don't treat knowing any of those as proof of your identity. It's absurd how that's not the case in other places.

daenney 4y ago
This is a really nice benefit. It honestly was weird coming from a country where knowing the social security number alone lets you take over someone's life and as such is highly regulated and locked down. The first time a random site prompted me for my personnummer I had a heart attack. But once you adjust to it for a second, it's quite nice. My personnummer is public info, and that's fine. With just that number alone, you can't do jack shit. Everywhere it's used online requires you to confirm/sign an action with BankID, or requires a valid ID and physical presence IRL. That's not to say it's impossible to social engineer your way into getting a BankID issued to you for your victim, but it's on the level of "getting someone's social security number" in other countries hard. Any site using BankID for auth doesn't get access to the cert so they can't leak it, and you can revoke your BankID for individual authenticators (like your phone) which you can't do with an SSN.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > . It honestly was weird coming from a country where knowing the social security number alone lets you take over someone's life and as such is highly regulated and locked down I guess that's better than the US where the SSN can take over someone's life and is completely unregulated and not at all locked down
cinntaile 4y ago
They most certainly treat knowing your personal ID as proof of your identity in plenty of cases. One example... People can change other people's addresses without any real proof, you need to opt-in at the tax agency so that you need an eID to do this. The tax agency explicitly mentions this on their website. https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inenglish/individualsandemployees/reportingachangeofaddress.4.5c1163881590be297b51920b.html https://skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inengli...

codedokode 4y ago

There is not much good in making the data public. For example, information about salary helps scammers to pick "fat" victims. A perfect victim is someone in their 60s-70s who had a good salary once and probably has savings. The crime rate might be low in Sweden but this information can be used by foreign scammers. Also this information can be useful for foreign spies (for example to find employees of companies doing work for defence).

edm0nd 4y ago

Seems like a great idea to apply misinformation to everything so that the data they list is inaccurate.

pmontra 4y ago

"the laws do not apply if they contravenes the constitution" Isn't the EU based on the primacy of EU laws over local ones? The Sweden constitution should have been amended long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_European_Union_law "The principle was derived from an interpretation of the European Court of Justice, which ruled that European law has priority over any contravening national law, including the constitution of a member state itself"

PeterisP 4y ago
There's no issue of primacy between laws as GDPR explicitly states that processing of private data which is required by some local law is legitimate. GDPR does apply to state and municipal institutions, requiring them to have a legal basis for processing private data, however, local laws can grant that legal basis and GDPR would not dispute it.

xoffeemuffins23 4y ago

Also a bit remarkable is that your social security number (personnummer) is not only used to identify you with official and government services, but also with every company you might have a customer account with. It consists of your birthdate and 4 numbers (which some people use as their pin code on their devices). On the other hand there's 2FA: when identifying to a service (like when calling customer support) you're asked for your personnummer, after which you have to open an app on your smartphone to verify with a 6 digit pin code. The trust in eachother went pretty far apparently, where garage sales sometimes just meant an open barn with a notice. Things for sale would have the price + an account number to make the payment to. (But haven't come across this myself yet, times are changing)

uri4 4y ago

» The short answer is that the only legal way is to apply for protected identity ... since it requires your life to be threatened Relatively simple way to get protected identity is to cross certain religion. Become apostate, publish nasty comics etc.. There were some nasty cases and police provides some level of protection, without too much questioning. Don't ask me for details.

hairofadog 4y ago

I was thinking this morning about how strange it was that in the U.S., in the old days of phone books, you had to pay to be unlisted otherwise they'd just publish your phone number and address right there in the white pages. Contrast to today when you can't pay to be unlisted but you do have the option to join a class action lawsuit against Equifax after they oops your social security number onto the dark web.

adamrezich 4y ago
we used to live in a significantly higher-trust society
- psychlops 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that so much as people had to physically go somewhere to use the stolen information. The possible damage was local and limited.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    No, this assumes all people have the same baseline tendency to abuse trust and commit fraud. You would then expect the remote scammers of, say, Maine pensioners to be from Alabama or Germany with the same rate (adjusted for population size) as from India, China, etc. This is not the case; your risk not equally distributed among all remote locations.
- ghaff 4y ago
  We used to also live in an environment where it was far harder to scale the misuse of information and profit from that misuse.

erk__ 4y ago

We have mostly the same in Denmark, though it is possible to apply for non-disclosure of name and address online [0] if you want to stay more private. I have spoken with expats who were rather surprised by it, but most danes don't really think too much about it. Similarly if you have a .dk domain your address must be listed on the whois. It should be noted that non-disclosure of name and address goes further, for example it was possible to see if anyone had it in the online system my university used because they would show up as their student id instead of their name in the interface. [0]: https://international.kk.dk/live/housing/moving-to-a-new-place/non-disclosure-of-name-and-address https://international.kk.dk/live/housing/moving-to-a-new-pla...

astrolx 4y ago

Actually, you can get removed from most of these websites rather simply, either by logging in with BankID and select that option, or by sending an angry email.

amai 4y ago

I'm sure also in Sweden nobody can figure out where the products you buy on Amazon are really produced or where a company is really paying taxes (if any). People have no right for privacy, but we allow companies and their products to be as anonymous as it gets. Find the mistake!