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.
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.
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.
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.
And it is. Newspapers do this all the time. "These people earn the most in your neighbourhood!" "These people earned the most in Sweden!" "This 1 27 year old earned THIS MUCH... And nobody knows who he is!"
I have insight into this to say that the politicians (and police) are already embarrassed about this, but it's exceptionally tricky to fix because they're hiding behind a key precept in the Swedish constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so.
No. Depends on how you look it up, but you could just send an email (from anonymous account if wanted) to the tax agency asking for someones salary. You get an answer back in a few days without them being notified.
Salary is not freely available, you generally have to pay for specific lookups as a private person.
However there is a lowtech way around this. Taxed income is published yearly in a book that resembles an old phonebook, Taxeringskalendern ("the tax calendar"). Freedoom of the press, see?
This book (or the part of the book that covers your region) will be available at your local library in the "reference" section. For most people you take the number from the book and divide by 12 and you have a lower bound of their monthly salary. Unless they are stalking you at the library noone will know. Very useful when going into salary negotiotiations to know aprox what the rest of the team and your boss makes.
That sounds like the perfect book for thieves to find out exactly who has money. I have survived living in sketchy high-theft areas by pretending to be poor -- this would totally blow my cover.
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.
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.
Before landlord allows you in they ask for proof of income one way or another. And after you moved in it is quite hard to kick you out unless you misbehave. As for friends: if they asked about your income, you refused to answer and they still look it up - what kind of friends they are then? And btw the tax records show how much taxable income you had, not its source.
No landlord has asked me for proof of income. You think this peasants and lords system you talk about is mandatory ? I don't care about friends, people are a waste of time to interact with when they're all dumber than me.
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) 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.
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?
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.
"The people who need it the most are usually the people the Swedish government wants dead," Citation very much needed. Both on the claims that the Swedish government actually want people dead. And that this would need this protection _usually_ are in this category.
There are literally thousands of people that has this protection. 14000 women has this, commonly to protect them against an abusive partner (not the government). This page in Swedish provides more info:
https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/mans-vald-mot-kvinnor/sk...
(Note that it is not thousands of new people each year. It is the number of people that has this protection. Out of 10+ million people,)
Good question.
From a technical, byrocratic point of view it breaks a lot of systems, which makes practical aspects in normal daily life hard. But that could be fixed, right? Efficiency over privacy is a political question.
But, as someone mentioned earlier the constitution and the general culture, society formed from has (probably - I'm guessing) fostered an openness that not only applies to public services and organizations too. For many people and generations, the government has been seen (and still is) perceived as something good. Something Swedish citizens are part of. But of course there are also people and political parties that think private privacy is more important, and should be increased.
As mentioned previously, I applied and got denied. For obvious reasons I don't really want to go into details, but the experience I have of the swedish police force is that it is completely meaningless to even report things to them.
In the UK the next step would be to approach either the Police and Crime Commissioner (an elected person who oversees the local Police service), or the local Member of Parliament, or to seek a Judicial Review via the courts.
If you’re genuinely at risk then surely this can be established and must become actionable?
Which means the title is pure clickbait, doesn't it? More than that, the title is pure falsehood (as shown in the submission at the time of posting this comment).
When I worked with loans for a middleman type of digital service, it was impossible to provide help to people with protected data. Nothing is visible when you take a credit report, so we couldn't do more after that. The consumers in question that I talked to said they were denied by every bank they talked to, they only came halfway through the process and I discovered the same thing when I tried once when knowing beforehand and a few times figuring it out on that step of the process.
"I'm more worried about the national DNA database where literally every single citizen who been born in Sweden is in. Seems usage by police and others are increasing while the purpose was suppose to be only for research."
It's a blood bio bank, not a DNA database - although the latter can be created from the former, of course. As far as I know it's only been used once by the police to identify a criminal, they used it to confirm the identity of the person who killed the minister of foreign affaris(?) Anna Lind.
It's not mandatory to take the test on your newborn, and it's possible to request your sample be destroyed.
There has been talk of opening up the samples to police use, but so far it's been decided that the downsides would overweigh the benefits. One of the fears is that opening up the samples for other use would mean fewer infants will be tested (increasing suffering for those who miss an important diagnosis), and some adults will reques their samples be destroyed (reducing the research value of the data set).
So in other words, they did the thing they said they weren't going to do but circumlocute it just enough so people don't think the police will continue to use it.
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%.
That still would make it the third-highest in Europe, only behind Belgium and Norway. It would still be 50% higher than Germany and over four times somewhere like Spain.
That was only correcting for the definition between those 2 countries. It says nothing about what percentage of rapes get reported in each country or how other European countries define things.
In the end it’s easy to compare numbers, it much harder to get at the underlying truth.
Not sure what kind of crime they are referring to, but they'd be correct if they merely talk about the trafficking and monetization of personal data.
This is an industry that only really became possible (and socially acceptable) in the last couple decades. Before that, the data may have been public, and isolated criminals would've no doubt used it, but in general there wasn't an entire industry dedicated to exploiting this data at large scale.
My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home, for example, even in 2020, because she'd lived so long in society as it was that she literally couldn't believe that it could end up as it had; and this wasn't due to stupidity. It was actually safe and normal once.
I'm from a very hick part of America and I know probably half a dozen people who used a phrase something like "unlocked doored, locked and loaded shotgun." Not exactly condoning that phrase, but the thief in hillbilly parts of America is gonna have to use force eventually if they want to steal from an occupied home whether it is locked or not.
I went into my uncle’s unlocked house and found myself staring down the barrel of his roommate’s gun. People don’t tend to go into occupied houses in the US as there is a very real risk of getting shot.
RC2 (resistance class 2) is to resist attacks with hammers, wedges and screwdrivers for three minutes.
RC3 is to resist five minutes of crowbar attack
RC4 is to resist power tools for 10 minutes
They're often made largely out of steel. I think RC3 is most common, but that RC4 is very rare.
i guess? i find most people knock like normal though. i have a good few guns though so i'm fully capable of defending myself. i never figured a residential grade lock was much good against someone anyway and if i'm right there it's not like someone can sneak in. i might be more worried if i was a small guy or a woman but i've never had a problem.
Where do you live? America is not uniformly high in crime. When I lived in NYC, people absolutely did lock their doors when at home. There was good reason for it too. I suspect other urban areas are similar.
I thoroughly recommend running the page through Google translate or DeepL for an insight into the reality of Stockholm just 50 years ago - it's a fascinating and horrific account of drug addicts and lowlifes brutally murdering each other in terrifying and depraved ways.
(DeepL translation:)
"Prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts moved in next door to students and underpaid casual workers. Pickpocketing, knife fights and burglaries became commonplace, and neighbourhoods once considered stately could now have been lifted from a Dickens novel. In the press, the area was called the swamp..."
yeah, and that was literally front page news and was an incredibly unusual event.
Furthermore, Östermalm has always been a place full of somewhat disreputable people, even though it ended up a place where relatively rich people lived. Notice that the story you're talking about involves prostitutes and all sorts of deranged stuff.
These people may have been associates of the upper class, but there is a reason we Swedes have always despised the upper class.
> that was literally front page news and was an incredibly unusual event.
My point wasn't about the specific case (obviously multiple horrific murders are not a common occurrence), I meant the general milieu of drug addiction, law-breaking, prostitution; the disgustingly dirty slum conditions that people lived in - all of which was accompanied by police corruption and brutality.
Naturally none of this is popular to bring up in front of Swedes nowadays.
As I see that the downvote of my Swedish-negative comments speaks volumes about how much you guys value freedom of expression.
I don't have enough comments to be able to downvote, so it's not me and it's far from certain that it's a Swede. This is a forum very few people from here frequent.
Citing statistics would be a lot more convincing than basing an argument around a single news story. I was under the impression that crime statistics show a deterioration. Is that not the case? (not a downvoter, btw, but maybe that's what they're objecting to)
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-c... a graph from Wikipedia showing some violent crimes increasing, but the change is more than just the numbers, and the numbers could now be underestimates because trust in police etc. has dropped.
The social trust that existed even with strangers and for which there was good reason is largely gone.
I used to think this about Sweden but literature of that time does not describe a society like that. Literature is often reflective of the world it is in.
Not like 2001 : A Space Odyssey is about what the world is like in 2001 but it sort of reflects the assumptions of the world at that time. For instance, there are no smartphones in that world.
Anyway, Swedish contemporary literature of that time doesn't tell such a picture which makes me think this is more a factor of an individual experience rather than what that society was like.
Where I grew up in the mid-Atlantic US people would commonly not lock their homes or cars. Near zero murder rate and home burglaries were exceptionally rare.
That's not an uncommon story in the US (maybe it is today), but you do have to be outside of cities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen.
After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated.
You can’t really cause problems for people this way.
And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist.
Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.
Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.
Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.
Stalking is ridiculously common everywhere and there's no reason to think it isn't in sweden as well. If no one you know has experienced it, or felt safe enough to confide in you, that still means nothing to everyone else. "What has soco heard about" is not a meaningful metric of anything.
I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence.
But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.
Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.
Violence because some Americans just cannot be trusted with public data.
My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage.
Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.
> Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common.
> And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals).
> You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc.
You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country.
Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.
People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations.
There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.
Some studies have found a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust [1], but it is difficult to have discussions about this since it is such a sensitive topic. And of course it is not the only factor.
I don't understand how you don't revolt against this to be honest.
And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.
I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer.
But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.
Based on my observations from having Swedish friends and spending time in Sweden, a lot of the rise of the extreme right there can be directly attributed to the tensions resulting from the Syrian refugee crisis.
The last time I was in Sweden, ordinary folks were expressing ideas like "well maybe not everyone deserves free healthcare".
Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
> Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
On the flip side, standard practice for left wing parties is to deny that immigration causes any problems at all and call you racist for even trying to discuss it. However, as we are seeing in Sweden, sometimes the problems become too big to ignore.
I do not deny that some who oppose lax immigration policies are racist, but just because some people who have certain concerns are racist does not mean that everyone who shares those concerns is also racist, or that those concerns are invalid.
Some people have in fact been trying to have discussions about immigration policies, but for quite a while proponents of lax immigration policies have dismissed any pushback against such policies as racist/xenophobic fear mongering.
The statistic is unfortunately being hijacked for that purpose. It is especially common for foreign news outlets to focus on this and it gives the impression that Sweden is not a safe place for women. The opposite is true however, Sweden is one of the safest places and on earth for women.
>Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
Increasing the importation of poor immigrants that are dependent on economic assistance and social services by definition reduces the economic opportunity and availability of social services for the already poor residents who are dependent on these services. Those who insist on rejecting this piece of objective reality because it doesn't jive with their political and/or cultural agenda create a vacuum for the "right wing" to be the only ones voicing the legitimate concerns people have about mass immigration.
Organized violent crime is mostly gang wars so ordinary people aren't directly affected. Although you could have bad luck and be mistaken for one of these gang members I guess.
I don't agree. I was in the Netherlands when there were gang wars in Amsterdam and these guys don't care about collateral damage at all. One time they shot up a tram full of people during some gang fight.
It's the same problem - heavy organised crime fighting turf wars in crowded cities.
Also, ATM raids are getting much more violent. They blow up half the building just to get to the cash in the machine. I think it's normal that people ask for the authorities to do more against this.
Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem, I think most of the calls just use telephony software to automate and brute force every possible number. They spoof the originating phone number but they 99.9% likelihood are coming from another country with call centers like India or the Philippines.
If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?
Fully automated robocalls are… just not a thing here. There are some phone salespeople but personally I don't think I've got more than a single digit amount of calls per year.
I don't think phone numbers are quite _as_ searchable as other information. I get fewer spam calls here than I did in Australia. A few years ago a phone provider called me and actually offered a really good mobile deal, which I'm still on. Another time I had some kind of survey company call. I think there's been a couple more over the last decade, but it's a rare occurrence.
Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.
I don't think I've ever gotten a spam call. I used to get the occasional telemarketer call, but I added my number to the NIX-registry (Do Not Call Registry) a few years ago and I've only gotten one marketing call since then.
Regulations around telemarketing are pretty strict here. I did report the one call I got and I got a follow-up email a few weeks later explaining what had happened (the company doing the marketing had experienced a technical glitch [1]).
> Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem
The US is also a large and attractive target, because the population is large and the setup costs of a phone scam can be amortized across a massive group. Remember that scamming is a numbers game - they have to hit massive numbers of targets in order for it to pay off, because the probability of success is so low at each stage.
Phone numbers within the US are compatible - there's no longer any meaningful difference between calling someone in Maine or Alaska - and it's easy to spoof area codes across state lines. So a scam that works in one state in the US can effectively be run in all 50 states with ~no change.
Sweden is a country only slightly larger than New York City, and an effective scam would likely have to be run in Swedish (a language not spoken widely outside Sweden, and therefore not transposable to another scam) and it's trickier to spoof numbers across country lines convincingly (even within the EU) than it is across state lines in the US.
This pattern plays out in a lot of ways, not just for Sweden. In general, smaller countries that speak languages not widely popular outside their home country will be less attractive targets (both for scams and for legitimate business) than countries which have a large potential market (target) size.
I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. That might require the carrier to forward the calls. There are other exceptions for robo calls the callers could be using for themselves.
If the robodialers are actually doing this inside of the US we could probably find who these people are. I imagine the majority of calls are made by a few scaled up calling operations. That's what previous arrests for this suggest. Although the technology is catching up and I have been getting fewer calls.
> I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know.
Maybe this wasn't clear in my previous comment: the calls often originate from outside the country, yes, but the calls are spoofing US numbers, so there's no way for the recipient to know that the call is from another country. And the calls often try to match the local area code of the recipient.
The point is that the scam scales very easily: if you can do it to any person in one state, you can do it to every person in every state (because calling all US phone numbers is essentially equivalent, and spoofing all states is equivalently easy).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's fairly difficult to establish criminal levels of defamation.
A recent high profile case in Sweden seems to establish that persecuting a man, acquitted by court, with continued accusations of sexual assault, through wide-audience Twitter and similar, as well as a number of moderately large audience paper publications, qualifies.
(For context: in the social environment in question the consequences effectively destroy the target's livelihood as well as severely impairing his social life)
But getting to near the end of that one took about five years of process, so I guess it can't have been firmly in obvious territory.
Multiple women were sentenced during #metoo. Presumably one took five years because they first tried to prosecute her for her book, which didn't succeed.
Absolutely! Freedom of expression in Sweden doesn't come close to the protection that first amendment to the US constitution provides. It's just that Sweden was first at introducing FOI-friendly tryckfrihetsförordningen.
it's interesting. I would think that freedom also means you cannot be compelled to provide data (or create speech) since that is not free expression or speech. But then again that would apply to government and bank forms too so it would not be a crime to lie to a bank, commit fraud, etc.
I don't know what to make of the database with respect to free speech/expression laws. Although admittedly the article says no one enforces that the data is accurate inside it. That seems reciprocal.
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?
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.
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.
Probably raised at renewal. Deflecting the issue really doesnt help. My advice stands - people should exercise due diligence before moving to that country.
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.
It may have been raised at renewal but notified beforehand. It is deeply frightening knowing someone can monitor your personal finances and with the law on their side.
Sounds like a bad, private landlord not affiliated with landlord associations. If the landlord was affiliated, this would be a breakage of agreement and the tenant union organization [0] could help, drive the case against the landlord.
This sounds incredibly hyperbolic. Others have already mentioned that this likely is an inaccurate retelling of events based on how Swedish rent control actually works. Additionally though, tax records from the previous year is publicly accessible, your current income (or any raise you receive) is _not_.
The article is not correct on salaries being public:
What is public are your tax reports and those are done a year later. To my knowledge you cannot see all details either, only totals that the tax is based on.
Thus I think your statement is wrong or at least it is not related to the public databases mentioned in the article.
Very easily obtained, though: just call +46856485160 and ask for it. They also reply to questions like "okay, so did this person have any siblings and what were their parents' names?" and "who else lives at that address?" and so on.
I have needed to provide information for a visa application including family history on dead half-relatives from a branch of the family tree I have very little contact with. It was a breeze. Names at birth, later marriages, dates of death and everything that I had no idea was given without delay (as stipulated by law).
Well across the border in Norway you can look up the pay of people, though I agree with sibling comments, I am rather sure that this practise would be illegal https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
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
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".
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.
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_internat...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it stems from people feeling stress from surveillance and other lack of control, and then they focus on the simple bits they can name rather than the uncountable records being kept on them.
The biggest issue if I were to spill my (SSN, legal name, home address) here, is not that you could map between my name and my address, but rather that you could map from this HN username to either of those things. And conversely through search engines, that someone who knows my legal name could map to this HN username.
Speaking from a very USian perspective, it's quite easy to own a piece of land without revealing your legal name. But it's not the default, and I agree that we should be more deliberate about it so either everyone gets the privacy, or nobody does.
I think the main problem is that this information is no longer limited to people able to view printed copies of the data, but available to anyone in the world with internet access (immediate, and free), and much more quickly searched and used.
Even in super privacy-conscious Germany, anyone can get my home address... but they still have to be willing and able to physically go to my town's registry office and individually request it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
1) Note the qualifier "the government knows everything"? There are plenty of things the government doesn't know. ghusto's comment doesn't seem to be that those should be public too.
2) ghusto might be a $FAMOUS_PERSON who wanted to make comments on HN, but not let fame influence the conversation.
There is a strange dichotomy between extreme transparency and extreme privacy. Both sound great despite of being mutually exclusive (you can't have transparency without loss of privacy). It seems like a complete mental blockage to reason about both simulatenously and it's hard to crystallize arguments.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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/) (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.
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.
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.
> . 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
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/inengli...
The address change fraud is a real problem, but the personnummer is used for identification and not authentication in that case as well.
The government cannot mandate all citizens to have e-IDs, so other alternatives to change your address must be provided. Since having an up to date address is mandatory, this alternative process must also be accessible (e.g. the closest tax office might be far away, so requiring the alternative process to be in-person would be impractical).
So the alternative process is that you fill in a form, sign it, and send it to the tax agency. To specify whose address is being changed, the form asks for your personnummer (it also asks for your name, but neither is intended to authenticate you). As verification, the tax agency sends a letter to your current address.
If the fraudster is able to intercept your mail, or if you do not notice the verification letter, the fraud is successful.
The e-ID alternative cannot be easily made opt-out, because the people who need the manual process also would be unable to opt out electronically. So as it stands, it’s opt-in, and almost everyone should opt into it.
Is this a mess, and a consequence of having a mandatory public address registry? Yes. But the personnummer isn’t used for authentication anywhere in this mess.
Are you saying that your physical mailbox is being used as the identity authentication instead rather than your personal number?
> the closest tax office might be far away, so requiring the alternative process to be in-person would be impractical.
Some countries require that the police visit you at home to verify that you live there, the closest police is hopefully not as far away as the closest tax office.
As the sibling comment says, the number is not authentication, it's just an identifier. That type of fraud works exactly the same way as sending a letter to the tax agency in any other country does: trust that people won't be so daring as to write fraudulent letters and sign off on them very often. Obviously it will happen sometimes, but they have processes to deal with fraud.
That's purely incidental, though. There is no hard choice betweeen "all your data has to be public" and "you can be totally screwed by identity theft if your private data is leaked".
The US system could be fixed much more efficiently by putting the burden of proof on the businesses who made the transaction instead of the individuals whose data got stolen (gave someone a loan who gave you a stolen SSN? better find out who you really gave it to).
That's one downside. :( I am slightly worried that someone could exploit my public details in Sweden to do ID theft on me in the country I moved from, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Technically your personal ID is not public knowledge. The first eight digits are, which contain your birth date. The last four digits are always obfuscated. In reality, it is common to provide your personnummer verbally in non-private settings so if someone within earshot had some interest in remembering your ID they could.
Edit: The above might not be entirely accurate, check out the thread below. Some of these lookup sites may reveal the personnummer on registration and possibly payment. I've never tried this so can't confirm for sure, however.
When I search for any name on that website, I see numbers as follows: "YYYYMMDD-XXXX" (with the "XXXX" parts being obfuscated). Do you mean it shows the full ID if you sign up for their service? I would be surprised if so, but have never tried that before so I suppose it's possible (that's also generally how these services provide tax information - behind a registration and usually paywall, even though you can request it for free from the tax office yourself as well).
Anyone can call the tax office and ask for the full person number of any person and they will give it.
Swedes are super confused about this so lots of people do the thing you talk about and think it's private but it's absolutely not. This disconnect between folk lore and reality is quite dangerous as people who believe the folk lore can start doing stupid shit like accepting the personnummer as alone being a guarantee of anything.
I edited my comment with the information I had at the time, and suggested that readers to check the threads beneath for more up to date information. I'm not sure why you're so offended about someone being wrong on the Internet, but I assure you it happens a lot. Hopefully all that caps helped you get some stress out though.
mrkoll.se lets you see personnummer, as do many other sites. Some of the big ones do not show it, but it's not because they can't, but because they do not want to.
In the US the financial institutions and the credit reporting and collection agencies have used rather insidious language like "stolen identity" to describe the situation where fraud was perpetrated on one of those agencies by an unknown 3rd party who presumably bore the ID credentials of the person in question thereby passing through the institution's identity checks.
The fraud in these cases is not the problem of the institution, it's the problem of the individual. They use that specific language to train everyone into thinking and accepting that it's their individual problem...you know, since someone "stole their identity".
Then, when the giant companies that collect and "securely store and process" the information that is typically used to perform ID verifications get hacked and this data leaks out for 300M+ people... oh well, tiny fine and a bit of bad press for a week. Then it's swept under the rug and the individuals in the society have to live with those consequences.
Everything here requires BankID and that seems a hell of a lot safer and much more convenient than what I hear is used in many other countries (although I don't think BankID should be privately owned like it is now).
Another upside that wasn't mentioned in the post is that all this legally required information really simplifies a lot of bureaucracy.
It could be done without the info being public I guess, but the law requiring that you register your place of residence makes voting and paying taxes really easy. The state already knows what municipality you live in, so you don't need to register to vote yourself and you don't have to figure out what taxes you need to pay (unless you're self-employed).
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).
260 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadIf showing the data is legal, then highlighting specific datapoints should be as well.
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
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.
Hint: it might end up leading to an uptick in antisemitism.
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.
No. Depends on how you look it up, but you could just send an email (from anonymous account if wanted) to the tax agency asking for someones salary. You get an answer back in a few days without them being notified.
However there is a lowtech way around this. Taxed income is published yearly in a book that resembles an old phonebook, Taxeringskalendern ("the tax calendar"). Freedoom of the press, see?
This book (or the part of the book that covers your region) will be available at your local library in the "reference" section. For most people you take the number from the book and divide by 12 and you have a lower bound of their monthly salary. Unless they are stalking you at the library noone will know. Very useful when going into salary negotiotiations to know aprox what the rest of the team and your boss makes.
Than in a country of 10 million
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) 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.
Or are you saying you did apply for this and it wasn't successful?
There are literally thousands of people that has this protection. 14000 women has this, commonly to protect them against an abusive partner (not the government). This page in Swedish provides more info: https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/mans-vald-mot-kvinnor/sk...
Good question.
From a technical, byrocratic point of view it breaks a lot of systems, which makes practical aspects in normal daily life hard. But that could be fixed, right? Efficiency over privacy is a political question.
But, as someone mentioned earlier the constitution and the general culture, society formed from has (probably - I'm guessing) fostered an openness that not only applies to public services and organizations too. For many people and generations, the government has been seen (and still is) perceived as something good. Something Swedish citizens are part of. But of course there are also people and political parties that think private privacy is more important, and should be increased.
If you’re genuinely at risk then surely this can be established and must become actionable?
It's a blood bio bank, not a DNA database - although the latter can be created from the former, of course. As far as I know it's only been used once by the police to identify a criminal, they used it to confirm the identity of the person who killed the minister of foreign affaris(?) Anna Lind.
The main purpose of the biobank is to detect rare disases in newborns, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newborn_screening
It's not mandatory to take the test on your newborn, and it's possible to request your sample be destroyed.
There has been talk of opening up the samples to police use, but so far it's been decided that the downsides would overweigh the benefits. One of the fears is that opening up the samples for other use would mean fewer infants will be tested (increasing suffering for those who miss an important diagnosis), and some adults will reques their samples be destroyed (reducing the research value of the data set).
When was this golden age of (almost) no crime, I wonder?
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%.
In the end it’s easy to compare numbers, it much harder to get at the underlying truth.
This is an industry that only really became possible (and socially acceptable) in the last couple decades. Before that, the data may have been public, and isolated criminals would've no doubt used it, but in general there wasn't an entire industry dedicated to exploiting this data at large scale.
My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home, for example, even in 2020, because she'd lived so long in society as it was that she literally couldn't believe that it could end up as it had; and this wasn't due to stupidity. It was actually safe and normal once.
Can someone enter your house without using any force or tools?
RC2 (resistance class 2) is to resist attacks with hammers, wedges and screwdrivers for three minutes. RC3 is to resist five minutes of crowbar attack RC4 is to resist power tools for 10 minutes
They're often made largely out of steel. I think RC3 is most common, but that RC4 is very rare.
This whole 'golden age' of Sweden is just such a bunch of bs.
Take a look, for instance, at this article about a part of central Stockholm which is now extremely expensive real estate:
https://skarn.se/hans-marmbo/ (in Swedish)
I thoroughly recommend running the page through Google translate or DeepL for an insight into the reality of Stockholm just 50 years ago - it's a fascinating and horrific account of drug addicts and lowlifes brutally murdering each other in terrifying and depraved ways.
(DeepL translation:) "Prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts moved in next door to students and underpaid casual workers. Pickpocketing, knife fights and burglaries became commonplace, and neighbourhoods once considered stately could now have been lifted from a Dickens novel. In the press, the area was called the swamp..."
Furthermore, Östermalm has always been a place full of somewhat disreputable people, even though it ended up a place where relatively rich people lived. Notice that the story you're talking about involves prostitutes and all sorts of deranged stuff.
These people may have been associates of the upper class, but there is a reason we Swedes have always despised the upper class.
My point wasn't about the specific case (obviously multiple horrific murders are not a common occurrence), I meant the general milieu of drug addiction, law-breaking, prostitution; the disgustingly dirty slum conditions that people lived in - all of which was accompanied by police corruption and brutality.
Naturally none of this is popular to bring up in front of Swedes nowadays.
As I see that the downvote of my Swedish-negative comments speaks volumes about how much you guys value freedom of expression.
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-c... a graph from Wikipedia showing some violent crimes increasing, but the change is more than just the numbers, and the numbers could now be underestimates because trust in police etc. has dropped.
The social trust that existed even with strangers and for which there was good reason is largely gone.
Not like 2001 : A Space Odyssey is about what the world is like in 2001 but it sort of reflects the assumptions of the world at that time. For instance, there are no smartphones in that world.
Anyway, Swedish contemporary literature of that time doesn't tell such a picture which makes me think this is more a factor of an individual experience rather than what that society was like.
Take one of the Agaton Sax books, a detective story. It's completely inconceivable in our present society.
That's not an uncommon story in the US (maybe it is today), but you do have to be outside of cities.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/981486/crime-free-days-s...
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.
You can’t really cause problems for people this way.
Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.
I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.
A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1].
[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...
It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.
I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence.
But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.
My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage.
Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.
> Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common.
> And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals).
> You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc.
You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country.
Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.
Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.
People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations.
There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.
I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer.
But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.
IMHO it’s pretty accurate unfortunately.
The last time I was in Sweden, ordinary folks were expressing ideas like "well maybe not everyone deserves free healthcare".
Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
On the flip side, standard practice for left wing parties is to deny that immigration causes any problems at all and call you racist for even trying to discuss it. However, as we are seeing in Sweden, sometimes the problems become too big to ignore.
Some people have in fact been trying to have discussions about immigration policies, but for quite a while proponents of lax immigration policies have dismissed any pushback against such policies as racist/xenophobic fear mongering.
Increasing the importation of poor immigrants that are dependent on economic assistance and social services by definition reduces the economic opportunity and availability of social services for the already poor residents who are dependent on these services. Those who insist on rejecting this piece of objective reality because it doesn't jive with their political and/or cultural agenda create a vacuum for the "right wing" to be the only ones voicing the legitimate concerns people have about mass immigration.
Also, ATM raids are getting much more violent. They blow up half the building just to get to the cash in the machine. I think it's normal that people ask for the authorities to do more against this.
If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?
Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.
Regulations around telemarketing are pretty strict here. I did report the one call I got and I got a follow-up email a few weeks later explaining what had happened (the company doing the marketing had experienced a technical glitch [1]).
[1] https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20...
The US is also a large and attractive target, because the population is large and the setup costs of a phone scam can be amortized across a massive group. Remember that scamming is a numbers game - they have to hit massive numbers of targets in order for it to pay off, because the probability of success is so low at each stage.
Phone numbers within the US are compatible - there's no longer any meaningful difference between calling someone in Maine or Alaska - and it's easy to spoof area codes across state lines. So a scam that works in one state in the US can effectively be run in all 50 states with ~no change.
Sweden is a country only slightly larger than New York City, and an effective scam would likely have to be run in Swedish (a language not spoken widely outside Sweden, and therefore not transposable to another scam) and it's trickier to spoof numbers across country lines convincingly (even within the EU) than it is across state lines in the US.
This pattern plays out in a lot of ways, not just for Sweden. In general, smaller countries that speak languages not widely popular outside their home country will be less attractive targets (both for scams and for legitimate business) than countries which have a large potential market (target) size.
If the robodialers are actually doing this inside of the US we could probably find who these people are. I imagine the majority of calls are made by a few scaled up calling operations. That's what previous arrests for this suggest. Although the technology is catching up and I have been getting fewer calls.
Maybe this wasn't clear in my previous comment: the calls often originate from outside the country, yes, but the calls are spoofing US numbers, so there's no way for the recipient to know that the call is from another country. And the calls often try to match the local area code of the recipient.
The point is that the scam scales very easily: if you can do it to any person in one state, you can do it to every person in every state (because calling all US phone numbers is essentially equivalent, and spoofing all states is equivalently easy).
Heja Sverige!
I was curious about this so found 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.
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.
A recent high profile case in Sweden seems to establish that persecuting a man, acquitted by court, with continued accusations of sexual assault, through wide-audience Twitter and similar, as well as a number of moderately large audience paper publications, qualifies.
(For context: in the social environment in question the consequences effectively destroy the target's livelihood as well as severely impairing his social life)
But getting to near the end of that one took about five years of process, so I guess it can't have been firmly in obvious territory.
I don't know what to make of the database with respect to free speech/expression laws. Although admittedly the article says no one enforces that the data is accurate inside it. That seems reciprocal.
Sweden is not the type of country that I would dare voicing my opinion in. It's simply not worth it.
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.
When I hear "monitor your personal finances" I think on a month to month basis or more frequently.
In Sweden, as written above it is yearly and with several months delay.
Also what you you write just doesn't "feel" realistic at all. Source: I live next to Sweden and have Swedish colleagues.
[0] https://www.hyresgastforeningen.se/
I have needed to provide information for a visa application including family history on dead half-relatives from a branch of the family tree I have very little contact with. It was a breeze. Names at birth, later marriages, dates of death and everything that I had no idea was given without delay (as stipulated by law).
Only way to get salary info is to count backwards from the tax records, which are made public after the coming May.
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.
What about homeless?
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.
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.
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.
The biggest issue if I were to spill my (SSN, legal name, home address) here, is not that you could map between my name and my address, but rather that you could map from this HN username to either of those things. And conversely through search engines, that someone who knows my legal name could map to this HN username.
Speaking from a very USian perspective, it's quite easy to own a piece of land without revealing your legal name. But it's not the default, and I agree that we should be more deliberate about it so either everyone gets the privacy, or nobody does.
Even in super privacy-conscious Germany, anyone can get my home address... but they still have to be willing and able to physically go to my town's registry office and individually request it.
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.
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/cykel...
~~Has nothing to do with that they found it when arresting the thief for something completely different~~
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.
I'm pretty sure my antisocial neighbor would consider robbing me if he knew my net worth.
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.
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.
1) Note the qualifier "the government knows everything"? There are plenty of things the government doesn't know. ghusto's comment doesn't seem to be that those should be public too.
2) ghusto might be a $FAMOUS_PERSON who wanted to make comments on HN, but not let fame influence the conversation.
One can well be anonymous in numerous different contexts even with the above mentioned data available publicly.
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 (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
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?
It makes me want to understand the subsequent 1000 years of history to see how they became as they are now.
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.
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/) (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.
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.
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
If so, can you mention just a few more?
The address change fraud is a real problem, but the personnummer is used for identification and not authentication in that case as well.
The government cannot mandate all citizens to have e-IDs, so other alternatives to change your address must be provided. Since having an up to date address is mandatory, this alternative process must also be accessible (e.g. the closest tax office might be far away, so requiring the alternative process to be in-person would be impractical).
So the alternative process is that you fill in a form, sign it, and send it to the tax agency. To specify whose address is being changed, the form asks for your personnummer (it also asks for your name, but neither is intended to authenticate you). As verification, the tax agency sends a letter to your current address.
If the fraudster is able to intercept your mail, or if you do not notice the verification letter, the fraud is successful.
The e-ID alternative cannot be easily made opt-out, because the people who need the manual process also would be unable to opt out electronically. So as it stands, it’s opt-in, and almost everyone should opt into it.
Is this a mess, and a consequence of having a mandatory public address registry? Yes. But the personnummer isn’t used for authentication anywhere in this mess.
> the closest tax office might be far away, so requiring the alternative process to be in-person would be impractical.
Some countries require that the police visit you at home to verify that you live there, the closest police is hopefully not as far away as the closest tax office.
The US system could be fixed much more efficiently by putting the burden of proof on the businesses who made the transaction instead of the individuals whose data got stolen (gave someone a loan who gave you a stolen SSN? better find out who you really gave it to).
Edit: The above might not be entirely accurate, check out the thread below. Some of these lookup sites may reveal the personnummer on registration and possibly payment. I've never tried this so can't confirm for sure, however.
There are several sites (upplysning.se for example) that show full length of the personal ID. How does that work if it is not public information?
Edit: I think you may be right and that registration and possibly payment could reveal the whole personnummer: https://www.imy.se/privatperson/dataskydd/introduktion-till-...
TIL!
Anyone can call the tax office and ask for the full person number of any person and they will give it.
Swedes are super confused about this so lots of people do the thing you talk about and think it's private but it's absolutely not. This disconnect between folk lore and reality is quite dangerous as people who believe the folk lore can start doing stupid shit like accepting the personnummer as alone being a guarantee of anything.
I'm curious about this part of your comment:
> so lots of people do the thing you talk about
What is "the thing" you're referring to?
> Some of these lookup sites may reveal the personnummer on registration and possibly payment
"some"? It's THE TAX OFFICE OF THE COUNTRY
"may"? WILL
"on registration"? No. YOU JUST CALL THEM. No questions asked.
Your comment with the edit is still enormously wrong.
In the US the financial institutions and the credit reporting and collection agencies have used rather insidious language like "stolen identity" to describe the situation where fraud was perpetrated on one of those agencies by an unknown 3rd party who presumably bore the ID credentials of the person in question thereby passing through the institution's identity checks.
The fraud in these cases is not the problem of the institution, it's the problem of the individual. They use that specific language to train everyone into thinking and accepting that it's their individual problem...you know, since someone "stole their identity".
Then, when the giant companies that collect and "securely store and process" the information that is typically used to perform ID verifications get hacked and this data leaks out for 300M+ people... oh well, tiny fine and a bit of bad press for a week. Then it's swept under the rug and the individuals in the society have to live with those consequences.
It's super fucked...and super stupid.
'Merica.
Another upside that wasn't mentioned in the post is that all this legally required information really simplifies a lot of bureaucracy. It could be done without the info being public I guess, but the law requiring that you register your place of residence makes voting and paying taxes really easy. The state already knows what municipality you live in, so you don't need to register to vote yourself and you don't have to figure out what taxes you need to pay (unless you're self-employed).
Also this information can be useful for foreign spies (for example to find employees of companies doing work for defence).