Agree. Proof of ID in the UK often means copies of utility bills. You can fill out your own with an online template pretty easily. Inside the UK you don't even need to bother with the notarization requirement. It is indeed backwards.

You can say "well you have a driving license" except if you're a teenager or an elderly person who surrendered theirs, you don't. You can also say "use a passport" but they're not convenient to carry and some people have never left the country so never owned one.

An ID card isn't a bad idea per se. It's the same as a driving license except everyone can have it.

What is bad in this round is the government making everyone have it on their phone "because digital is cheaper" (guarantee it will cost billions either way). Similar problems - what about people who don't have phones, how do you mandate I install this on my dumb phone?

The previous iteration might've worked had they not gone overboard on sequencing everyone's genome and giving every government agency and their dog access (only slight exaggeration) to the data.

> There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "utility bill" or a "credit card statement" - on paper, posted by snail-mail to my home address!)

These are always digital in the UK too. When I did my mortgage application I had to go to my bank, ask them to print me out a statement and then stamp it to 'verify' that it was real.

I'm in the process of renewing my mortgage. Both my and my wife's banks allow you to export the most recent statement as a PDF, which we passed to the broker and have had no complaint. Same thing with the initial mortgage five years ago.

Swede here. I would not want to go back to days without BankID and related tools. That being said, the implementation has some less than desirable features. It's privately owned by some kind of joint venture by the banks. It only supports the major OS:s. So you're pretty much forced to own a Android or IPhone to function. Also, I haven't had the need to do this myself but taking care of somebody else's legal dealings (like an old parent or children) I understand is quite cumbersome. I think that kids are kind of forced to get BankID when they are quite young.

There are alternative implementations but I'm not aware of anyone that uses them.

It's more like we've slipped into this solution out of pure convenience than having made a deliberate choice.

You can use the “säkerhetsdosa” to authorise yourself, at least with Swedbank. I use FreeBSD.

But yes. An open, free software solution would be welcome.

BankID is the worst of both worlds, where a private company can deny you the access to public services.

Absolutely hate BankID, making it too easy to integrate has resulted in businesses and the government requiring it in places where it's totally unnecessary.

I live overseas, don't have a Nordic bank account. Now when I'm occasionally visiting, I can't buy alcohol because the website requires me to prove my age with BankID.

This, as opposed to most of Europe where you can just have alcohol delivered without anybody asking you for ID at any point. I'd be happy to show an ID at the point of collection/delivery, but buying beer shouldn't require strong KYC.

Sweden is one of the most legally restrictive European countries when it comes to buying alcohol though. So no surprise that it's harder here in that regard. I'd be very surprised if you didn't need to use BankID to buy alcohol online. I'm surprised you can buy online at all.

You are misrepresenting this slightly in my opinion.

Yes, we have strong laws around alcohol sales in Sweden that try to limit damage to society from excessive alcohol consumption while bringing in tax that can be used for state services instead of going to corporations.

However!

We have a well-run state monopoly (Systembolaget) that sells alcoholic beverages at reasonably good prices, with a wide selection and friendly knowledgeable staff. You don’t need BankID to shop at any of their physical stores which are spread all across the country. If they think you might be under 20 you will need to show physical ID, passport is fine.

Any restaurant or bar that sells alcohol will happily sell to you, unless you are underage.

Low-grade alcoholic beverages (<=3.5%), including many beers, can be bought in any grocery store.

I'm certainly not complaining about the in-person experience, but specifically about how the online experience sucks.

I visited Sweden this summer. One or two things accepted only Swish payment. Seems to be impossible for a visitor to use, you need to set it up with your bank.

I managed by asking a friend to use theirs. But don't assume that tech that "makes life easier" automatically means that it's inclusive. (See also parallel discussion today about EU Age Verification app [0]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359074

I too not long ago went through the inheritance gunk with the UK.

> These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.

My experience of this was they (the insurance/solicitors) were just being obstructionist for fun, because when confronted with the requested notarized documents they kept moving the goalposts around, and only a threat to withdraw business from them on other fronts made them snap out of it.

I haven't had any organisation insist on a paper copy of a bill/statement for probably 10 years now

Nor have I ever had to prove my identity to a utility company to initiate service, so I'm not sure why a bill or statement with a name on it is proof of anything.

And when my father died, the water and electric service stayed on in his name for another decade at the house. Nobody really seems to care as long as the bills get paid.

Part of the reason this is difficult maybe that there's an ongoing problem in the UK of foreign gangs using faked documents to steal inheritances[1][2].

I'm skeptical though whether a compulsory ID card for British nationals would help with that.

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/shadow-world-the-grav...

2. https://www.theabi.org.uk/news/is-eastern-european-organised...

The clearest example of the deficiencies of identity documents in the UK is the "Right to Work" process.

If you're an employer, you are legally required to check that anyone you hire has the right to work in the UK. The penalty for hiring an illegal immigrant - even accidentally - is a £60,000 fine. The guidance on how to perform a Right to Work check is 60 pages. A whole industry of third-party identity verification providers has sprung up, because the system is so complex that most employers don't feel able to do it themselves.

Ironically, performing a right to work check on a legal migrant with a work permit is trivially easy, because we've digitalised the visa system. They give you their Home Office share code, you type it in to a website, and the website shows you a photo of that person and clearly states whether or not that person has the right to work. We already have a really good digital ID service, but British nationals can't use it.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6878ead80263c...

https://www.gov.uk/evisa/view-evisa-get-share-code-prove-imm...

On the other-other hand, here in Spain we have universal digital IDs, and we still need notarised paper copies of every document for every official process. Sometimes these processes are lining enough pockets they will never die...