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Switzerland To Hold Referendum on Introducing Electronic ID (swissinfo.ch) 28

Switzerland will hold a national referendum on the introduction of electronic identity cards after opponents of the legislation secured enough signatures to force a public vote. The Federal Chancellery confirmed Wednesday that 55,344 valid signatures were submitted against the Federal Act on Electronic Identity passed last December.

The proposed e-ID would enable citizens to apply online for criminal record extracts, driving licenses, and age verification when purchasing alcohol. This marks the second referendum on e-ID implementation, after voters rejected a previous version in 2021. The government has revised its approach, making the new system free, optional, and fully state-operated rather than privately managed. If approved, the e-ID would come into force no earlier than 2026, though the collection effort suggests privacy concerns remain paramount for many Swiss voters.

Switzerland To Hold Referendum on Introducing Electronic ID

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  • Why anyone would want this, IDK. What's wrong with just carrying a card in your wallet?
    • by Krneki ( 1192201 )

      If you want to buy any regulated goods online you need one of this.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      The answer is in the second paragraph of the summary.
      It is two-factor authentication for when doing things over the Internet that requires a high level of security.

      We've got the model with commercial entities over here in Sweden, and it blows. The market-leader (I don't want to call it "popular") is used for online banking. It wasn't really two-factor authentication in the true sense of the word, and has therefore not been impervious to scams in which people have lost their savings -- after which the banks

    • Re:Just say no (Score:5, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Thursday May 08, 2025 @11:22AM (#65361555) Journal

      Why anyone would want this, IDK. What's wrong with just carrying a card in your wallet?

      Plastic cards suck, for many reasons.

      1. They're forgeable. Digitally-signed data is not. Sure, governments can and do implement lots of anti-forgery mechanisms, but it takes almost as much expertise to use those anti-forgery mechanisms to validate a legitimate card as it does to fake one. Approximately no one checking plastic cards knows how to properly validate them. Digital ID cards require a bit of equipment to check them, but the equipment is ubiquitous (almost every smartphone in existence has all of the tech necessary, all you need is an app), and unless the attacker can either pwn the verification device or subvert the legitimate issuing system, they're unforgeable.

      2. They cannot provide data minimization. Electronic IDs enable you to provide only the subset of data that is needed for the current use. For example, if you're buying alcohol the only information the store needs is whether you're over the minimum age. They don't need your home address, your driving privileges, your name... they don't even need your birthdate. Just a single yes/no bit -- plus some way to prove that the person presenting the ID is the legitimate holder (there are some good privacy-preserving options here, but that's a subject for another post). Contrast that to a plastic card with all the info printed on the front and repeated in a 2D barcode on the back, enabling easy snarfing of the whole data set. Digital IDs are better for privacy than plastic cards.

      3. They don't work online. We use various workarounds for this, but they're all far worse for privacy, requiring users to provide far more information about themselves, not only beyond what's minimally necessary for the transaction, but even beyond what the ID card has. This is because the most important information isn't so much the content of the card as the proof of authenticity.

      In the future we're going to look back at the era of ID cards and papers and shudder at how bad they are.

      Of course, there are also risks. The biggest one is that having an ID that does work online means that more online services will want to use that ID. This is good where it enables transactions that currently can't happen online at all, and probably good where it makes transactions that occur now but are risky less risky. It's bad where it facilitates user data collection and user identification for transactions that don't really need it at all. But IMO that risk is better managed refusing to provide ID when it really isn't warranted, and by insisting that when ID presentation does make sense that the data provided is held to the absolute minimum required, rather than forgoing all of the other privacy, usability and security benefits of digital IDs.

    • by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      Why anyone would want this, IDK. What's wrong with just carrying a card in your wallet?

      A physical ID card is only really suitable for in-person identification. As more and more services are provided online, better electronic identification mechanisms are being developed.

    • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      I don't like to carry stuff around that I don't have to. Often I don't even carry a wallet when I go out

  • by Rinnon ( 1474161 ) on Thursday May 08, 2025 @10:57AM (#65361469)
    It's pretty cool that in a population of about 8.8 million, it only takes 55k signatures to trigger a referendum (about 0.006% of the population). I'm not saying that's always a good idea but Switzerland has, as far as I am aware, a long history of putting policy like this directly to the electorate.
    • Right. A true democracy at work. Now pardon me while I take my SIG 550 to the range for some target practice.

    • I'm not saying that's always a good idea

      Doesn't scale particularly well, it would seem. Many jurisdictions have some form of direct democracy at a local level, with the electorate involved being the size, or larger even, than the entire Swiss population. It just rarely goes to a national level, perhaps for good reasons.

      • by bsolar ( 1176767 )

        Doesn't scale particularly well, it would seem. Many jurisdictions have some form of direct democracy at a local level, with the electorate involved being the size, or larger even, than the entire Swiss population. It just rarely goes to a national level, perhaps for good reasons.

        Maybe nowadays with more efficient voting systems it could scale better. The issue is more about having a responsible population IMHO.

        The original Swiss direct democracy is the Landsgemeinde [wikipedia.org] which of course only works at a very small scale being an in-person meeting.

      • Doesn't scale particularly well, it would seem.

        Probably in 5th century BC's Athens: yes, direct voting would have had trouble scaling beyond city-states.

        But in the 21st century we have access to better tech than raising hand in town square (Landsgemeinde) and we can scale it to a whole country that speaks 4 dfifferent language officially (Switzerland is not culturally homogenous).

        Nowadays, you could probably manage to expand it across whole Europe, but the EU went for representative democracy instead of direct democracy.
        (Which is part of the reason wh

      • I'm not saying that's always a good idea

        Doesn't scale particularly well, it would seem.

        That kind of democracy is only workable with small populations, and the more culturally homogenous the better. In big nations with huge populations, you're going to have too many vital differences. Over the years I've become convinced that countries can get too big, and that once you reach a certain size and the differences in various areas becomes too much, it's time for a peaceful divorce. In huge countries, people become resentful when their lives are run by a few men in a city far away from them. They d

    • It's pretty cool that {...} Switzerland has, as far as I am aware, a long history of putting policy like this directly to the electorate.

      For you it is a marvel of Direct Democracy.
      For us it's just a random Sunday. :-D

      (well, actually I don't vote in-person usually, so it's more a "making a detour to the mail-box in front of the City Hall" Friday in my case)

    • You botched the math here - it's about 0.6% of the population.
      • by Rinnon ( 1474161 )

        You botched the math here - it's about 0.6% of the population.

        Yes, you are correct, my bad.

  • ... the Swiss franchise for RFID blocking wallets.

  • "enable citizens to apply online for criminal record extracts, driving licenses, and age verification when purchasing alcohol."

    Not sure if they should be promoting people applying for driving licenses when purchasing alcohol.

  • "This marks the second referendum on e-ID implementation, after voters rejected a previous version in 2021. The government has revised its approach, making the new system free, optional, and fully state-operated rather than privately managed."

    Right, but it won't stay optional. If you think it will, you shouldn't be allowed to leave the house by yourself, lest you convert your entire retirement portfolio to magic beans again.

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