Switzerland To Hold Referendum on Introducing Electronic ID (swissinfo.ch) 43
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.
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.
Just say no (Score:1)
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If you want to buy any regulated goods online you need one of this.
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In person
If you want alchohol, tobacco, ... you need to go in person to buy it.
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That's actually not true. You can easily order alcoholic beverages in Switzerland online today.
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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
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Re:Just say no (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Maybe you should ask the EU citizen living in the UK how well a digital ID works for them.
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Maybe you should ask the EU citizen living in the UK how well a digital ID works for them.
Both the EU and UK are participating in international standardization efforts, so it will work fine. It'll take some time to get there, of course.
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Maybe you should ask the EU citizen living in the UK how well a digital ID works for them.
We don't judge the systems of the world based on the way the UK incompetently fucks them all up.
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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.
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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
Re: Just say no (Score:2)
Yeah. Exactly. In my country government provided electronic IDs have been a thing for some time. Payments too.
I haven't carried a wallet with me for years. I also use the e-ID to log and validate all public services I use, mostly on-line, with no hassle. Heck, I even use it to vote and do my taxes in just a few minutes, for free!
I must note, none of this is compulsory. You can still use your phisycal documents if you want. It's just that you'll have a bit more trouble to do all the things I mencionei before
Direct Democracy at Work (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Direct Democracy at Work (Score:2)
Right. A true democracy at work. Now pardon me while I take my SIG 550 to the range for some target practice.
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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.
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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.
Scale. (Score:3)
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
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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
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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.
Switzerland is among the least culturally homogeneous countries in the world [wikipedia.org]:
Switzerland lies at the crossroads of several major European cultures. Three of the continent's major languages, German, French and Italian, are national languages of Switzerland, along with Romansh, spoken by a small minority. Therefore, Swiss culture is characterized by diversity, which is reflected in a wide range of traditional customs. The 26 cantons also account for the large cultural diversity.
Furthermore, Switzerland is a Federation, meaning that each "canton" is its own individual state. There is a lot of diversity in laws and administrations since each of the above mentioned cantons is in fact a democratic republic with its own Consititution, laws and customs.
Democracy as usual (Score:2)
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. :-D
For us it's just a random Sunday.
(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)
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You botched the math here - it's about 0.6% of the population.
Yes, you are correct, my bad.
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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.
It's a situation that works well for the Swiss because they're Swiss.
There aren't enough fringe lunatics to hold the rest of the population to ransom, most Swiss are generally considerate, rational and moderate.
Re: Direct Democracy at Work (Score:1)
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It's a nice thing to have from a democratic point of view, but also a massive attack surface to be exploited.
We say how disastrous referendums can be in the UK back in 2016. One of the worst campaigns on memory, large sections of the population believing obvious and repeatedly debunked lies, and interference from Russia who scores a massive victory over us.
For it to work you need a well informed and properly engaged population, with strong safeguards to make sure that they stay that way.
I want ... (Score:2)
Anybody see a problem here? (Score:1)
"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.
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These are the same people that also managed to remain free while being fully surrounded by the Axis.
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Where else was the Axis supposed to hide all the money and gold it took from the people? These free people were more than happy to offer their services.
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Where else was the Axis supposed to hide all the money and gold it took from the people? These free people were more than happy to offer their services.
There is no doubt the Axis wanted to eventually annex Switzerland, there are even historical records of that. It took both diplomacy and deterrence to keep Switzerland free and a very pragmatic approach. There is a reason the Alps are full of military installations even today.
While I understand pragmatic approaches might look bad from a purely idealistic point of view, idealism and reality sometimes come at odds and whether one might like it or not, reality wins by definition. It's also far too easy to be i
Pray they don't revise their approach further. (Score:3)
"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.
Re:Pray they don't revise their approach further. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You would be right in most countries, but in Switzerland citizens have actually quite a lot of leverage on the government so the government has to actually thread carefully. If they are not convincing enough, citizens can relatively easily stop new laws as they did with the first e-ID referendum. 50K signatures are relatively easy to secure and that kind of referendum is decided by simple majority without quorum.
Furthermore, in Switzerland 100K signatures are all it needs to start the process of a popular initiative [wikipedia.org], which is effectively a Constitutional amendment proposal.
Successfully passing a popular initiative is harder but definitely possible so if the government pisses enough people off they might have to deal with a new Constitution that explicitly prohibits them to do what the they wanted to do or forces them to do what they didn't want to do.
Slippery (Score:3)
>"The government has revised its approach, making the new system free, optional"
Optional, yeah, right....
Until businesses and retailers get in on the action and then you effectively can't join, buy, sell, rent, whatever, without it. Yes, I know this is a slippery-slope argument. But that slope often does exist and can be slippery.
Truth my parents told me (Score:2)
You have nothing unless you have a printed paper as a proof in you hand.