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Estonia government locks down ID smartcards: Refresh or else

Slx

Ireland's currently and rather controversially rolling out a "voluntary" electronic ID card which is required for claiming all types of social payment, applying for a driving test or a passport and a number of other things, including oddly enough operating as a public transport ID for old age pensioners who all get free travel.

It's a smart card that contains biometrics (facial recognition) and has good photos on the front. It looks for all intents and purposes exactly like Continental European ID cards and you register by attending an appointment at an ID verification centre.

The card also uses 2 or 3 factor (SMS verification) security and secret question answers to authenticate things online for access to sensitive personal information like welfare records though a service called MyGovID which grants various levels of access depending on how many layers of security you've setup.

At present the tax system (ROS) still has its own online sign in service using fairly complex digital certificates.

It makes sense in that it gives you a definitive form of ID for accessing stage services, which is probably more secure than the current Irish gold standard form of ID, a utility bill in your name.

We've also introduced a passport card as an extension of your existing passport. You apply this by downloading an app to your mobile, taking a selfie and that's then compared to your existing passport photo on file. They issue the card and you can use it for EU/EEA travel and as an alternative to ID cards so you don't have to carry your passport book while on the continent.

For practical reasons you do need some of these things. It's crazy having to provide umpteen documents to various public bodies to prove who you are and prove your address everytime you need to access something and it does improve security.

What worries me though is the potential single point of failure issues and also the possible function creep, if it's not tightly regulated. That's already happened with PPS numbers (equivalent or Social Security / National Insurance) where all of a sudden they're needed for everything from school registration to applying to University etc etc

Add to that Ireland now has a postal code system called Eircode that assigns a unique 7 character alphanumeric code to every address, not to a street / area like UK or most other systems.

It's incredibly handy for sat nav use when enabled. Like you can just whack in X12 A1B2 and Google maps will take you to the door. But it is starting to look like we are increasingly trading privacy for convenience.

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