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It does sound great when it works. It’s awesome that Estonia succeeded. I do believe this is a really hard problem - digitising public services - to solve at sc

It does sound great when it works. It’s awesome that Estonia succeeded. I do believe this is a really hard problem - digitising public services - to solve at scale. Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government. In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service? I believe that’s why we see so many unfinished systems not working together because they have to be built completely separately by each local government since they operate in autonomy.

germanier 4y ago
Which is why countries like Germany roll out federated decentralized login solutions – it's just a really slow process due to (among many other factors) the humongous number of stakeholders to involve.
spaniard89277 4y ago
In Spain they're trying... but not really succeeding. > Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government. Here this is particularly relevant with healthcare. In some regions I get full coverage with my regional card with no questions asked. In others I have to go through hoops, and apparently they have no way of knowing my clinical history. > In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service? In Spain they tried to solve this with DNIe (your national identity card has a chip) and cetificates. Turns out it's quite difficult to make it work for 99% of the people, and even if you're tech savvy some government portals make it SO HARD that you just want to give up. In a job I had before they used VMs with Windows XP and IExplorer for some services. It improved a lot in last years, but the improvement is in areas where you have to pay money, they've got fast for that. Everything else is still a mess. So in the end they'd come up with Cl@ave 365 with is a login/password solution you have to set up in person into some government office but it doesn't give you access to the full catalog of services, so you still need DNIe/Certificate. The thing is, they still get the money from you. Nobody gets fired. Friendly contractors still get money. There's no rush to improve. They have no incentives. But the worst thing is that they have this mess going on, and when old people goes to some government office they tell them to go online and do their own thing. Pretty much like companies. Feels nice to pay taxes for a service isn't being provided. There's people pushing to get this fixed, but the spanish state is... like an angry elephant.
- germandiago 4y ago
  España es un desastre. Yo me he ido. Y va a ser difícil que vuelva. Vaya cómo está el tema... de pena todo.
  - spaniard89277 4y ago
    Podría ser mucho peor, el problema no es lo mal que está, el problema es que en términos generales no mejora. Hay países en el este de Europa que claramente están progresando, sus estados, su economía, su sociedad. España cada vez está más dividida, pobre, y su sociedad más tensionada.
    - germandiago 4y ago
      Eso en parte es porque la gente se concentra en el mensaje polarizador de los políticos en vez de ocuparse de lo importante, que es de qué vamos a vivir y cómo y cómo vamos a reducir la deuda y pagar las pensiones o mejorar el mercado laboral. En cambio lo que oirás es que si los nacionalismos, que si LGTBQ o qué malos son unos o los otros en todas direcciones. No tengo nada en contra ni de esos grupos ni de indepes ni de nadie a nivel personal. Tan solo pienso que no es lo fundamental y toda esa gente se mete ahí para sacar tajada. Por eso no voto ni votaré.
      - spaniard89277 4y ago
        Es un diagnóstico que comparto.
- mendigou 4y ago
  I just returned to Spain and went through this Cl@ve thing only to realize it cannot be used for a lot of "federal" (estatales) services nor for the "state" (comunidad autónoma) services. In Spain we have so many layers of bureaucracy that it's making me glad I left. Public notaries, the State Registry, and the Cadastre, are some of the most archaic institutions I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They even look at me like I'm an alien when I ask about digitized records (escrituras) or at least an index. On the other hand in Singapore I paid my taxes and my company taxes in literally less than 5 minutes. In Finland I had an integrated citizen experience. Even in Germany, despite the reputation, things were somewhat integrated between the tax authority and the social security.
skeletal88 4y ago
The success of our Estonian digitalized government services is possible because we have: A nationwide digital ID, that can be used to authenticate someone, We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. The Id number enables the next thing: it is mandated by laws that every type of information should only be stored once. My name, date of birth, where I live and document photo is stored in the citizens registry. If elections start then the local municipality knows who are it's residents and everyone is sent an e-mail or letter about where they can go to cast the vote. If I want to renew my driver's license then I can choose to use the photo I last used to get a new passport or Id document. The one place to store one type of information is enabled by the national id number, because we know exactly that this person in this registry is the same one with the same number in the other registry, even though they may have the same name and date of birth, there is no possibility to confuse someone. And this makes keeping data safe easier, because it's easier to secure one database, than twenty ones that some random government departments would otherwise have to store my name, address or whatever else they would need. And their data would be mostly out of date, since it would get updated only when I interacted with them.
- mindslight 4y ago
  > We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their own nefarious purposes. Without private protections, such an identity number becomes a vulnerability for individuals. Like in the United States as it stands, it's a feature that giving out your social security number might result in a huge headache, otherwise every retailer would demand it for their consumer surveillance ("loyalty") programs etc.
  - skeletal88 4y ago
    Even without my number the retailers know my e-mail or whatever else I used to sign up for their loyality cards or benefits, they already know what I buy. If they know my personal number, then they can't know anything in addition to what they would have without it. But having strong protection for privacy is a must also. Every time someone accesses my data in the national registries the access is logged - who did it and when. For example I can see that the city I live in is checking if I still live there, because they offer free public transport to residents. Also I can see that the doctor I visited looked at my data, maybe also the aphotecary where I got my prescribed medicine from, because.. all the prescriptions are also digital documents, very-very rarely something is put on paper (for example, when a vet doctor prescribes some antibiotics and I can get them from the apothecary). Othewise I just give them my id card, they look at the number, type it in, and can see what I have been prescribed.
colechristensen 4y ago
Locally they completely redid the computer systems of the DMV a few years back… And botched it. Everything started taking twice as long and you wouldn’t get a new license for weeks or months after you went in.

germanier 4y ago

Which is why countries like Germany roll out federated decentralized login solutions – it's just a really slow process due to (among many other factors) the humongous number of stakeholders to involve.

spaniard89277 4y ago

In Spain they're trying... but not really succeeding. > Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government. Here this is particularly relevant with healthcare. In some regions I get full coverage with my regional card with no questions asked. In others I have to go through hoops, and apparently they have no way of knowing my clinical history. > In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service? In Spain they tried to solve this with DNIe (your national identity card has a chip) and cetificates. Turns out it's quite difficult to make it work for 99% of the people, and even if you're tech savvy some government portals make it SO HARD that you just want to give up. In a job I had before they used VMs with Windows XP and IExplorer for some services. It improved a lot in last years, but the improvement is in areas where you have to pay money, they've got fast for that. Everything else is still a mess. So in the end they'd come up with Cl@ave 365 with is a login/password solution you have to set up in person into some government office but it doesn't give you access to the full catalog of services, so you still need DNIe/Certificate. The thing is, they still get the money from you. Nobody gets fired. Friendly contractors still get money. There's no rush to improve. They have no incentives. But the worst thing is that they have this mess going on, and when old people goes to some government office they tell them to go online and do their own thing. Pretty much like companies. Feels nice to pay taxes for a service isn't being provided. There's people pushing to get this fixed, but the spanish state is... like an angry elephant.

germandiago 4y ago
España es un desastre. Yo me he ido. Y va a ser difícil que vuelva. Vaya cómo está el tema... de pena todo.
- spaniard89277 4y ago
  Podría ser mucho peor, el problema no es lo mal que está, el problema es que en términos generales no mejora. Hay países en el este de Europa que claramente están progresando, sus estados, su economía, su sociedad. España cada vez está más dividida, pobre, y su sociedad más tensionada.
  - germandiago 4y ago
    Eso en parte es porque la gente se concentra en el mensaje polarizador de los políticos en vez de ocuparse de lo importante, que es de qué vamos a vivir y cómo y cómo vamos a reducir la deuda y pagar las pensiones o mejorar el mercado laboral. En cambio lo que oirás es que si los nacionalismos, que si LGTBQ o qué malos son unos o los otros en todas direcciones. No tengo nada en contra ni de esos grupos ni de indepes ni de nadie a nivel personal. Tan solo pienso que no es lo fundamental y toda esa gente se mete ahí para sacar tajada. Por eso no voto ni votaré.
    - spaniard89277 4y ago
      Es un diagnóstico que comparto.
mendigou 4y ago
I just returned to Spain and went through this Cl@ve thing only to realize it cannot be used for a lot of "federal" (estatales) services nor for the "state" (comunidad autónoma) services. In Spain we have so many layers of bureaucracy that it's making me glad I left. Public notaries, the State Registry, and the Cadastre, are some of the most archaic institutions I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They even look at me like I'm an alien when I ask about digitized records (escrituras) or at least an index. On the other hand in Singapore I paid my taxes and my company taxes in literally less than 5 minutes. In Finland I had an integrated citizen experience. Even in Germany, despite the reputation, things were somewhat integrated between the tax authority and the social security.

skeletal88 4y ago

The success of our Estonian digitalized government services is possible because we have: A nationwide digital ID, that can be used to authenticate someone, We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. The Id number enables the next thing: it is mandated by laws that every type of information should only be stored once. My name, date of birth, where I live and document photo is stored in the citizens registry. If elections start then the local municipality knows who are it's residents and everyone is sent an e-mail or letter about where they can go to cast the vote. If I want to renew my driver's license then I can choose to use the photo I last used to get a new passport or Id document. The one place to store one type of information is enabled by the national id number, because we know exactly that this person in this registry is the same one with the same number in the other registry, even though they may have the same name and date of birth, there is no possibility to confuse someone. And this makes keeping data safe easier, because it's easier to secure one database, than twenty ones that some random government departments would otherwise have to store my name, address or whatever else they would need. And their data would be mostly out of date, since it would get updated only when I interacted with them.

mindslight 4y ago
> We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone. It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their own nefarious purposes. Without private protections, such an identity number becomes a vulnerability for individuals. Like in the United States as it stands, it's a feature that giving out your social security number might result in a huge headache, otherwise every retailer would demand it for their consumer surveillance ("loyalty") programs etc.
- skeletal88 4y ago
  Even without my number the retailers know my e-mail or whatever else I used to sign up for their loyality cards or benefits, they already know what I buy. If they know my personal number, then they can't know anything in addition to what they would have without it. But having strong protection for privacy is a must also. Every time someone accesses my data in the national registries the access is logged - who did it and when. For example I can see that the city I live in is checking if I still live there, because they offer free public transport to residents. Also I can see that the doctor I visited looked at my data, maybe also the aphotecary where I got my prescribed medicine from, because.. all the prescriptions are also digital documents, very-very rarely something is put on paper (for example, when a vet doctor prescribes some antibiotics and I can get them from the apothecary). Othewise I just give them my id card, they look at the number, type it in, and can see what I have been prescribed.

colechristensen 4y ago

Locally they completely redid the computer systems of the DMV a few years back… And botched it. Everything started taking twice as long and you wouldn’t get a new license for weeks or months after you went in.