Thread with 9 posts
jump to expanded post
an exciting personal report from the world of "e-identification" (sweden)
in sweden, life revolves around the "mobile bankid". this is a service owned by major swedish banks that provides a smartphone app equivalent to a state id card, but which can be used to log into websites
for a long time, there's been a bit of a hole in this system: the banks check your government id when you first create your account, but after that, you can basically just use your existing bankid to create a new bankid (true for my bank at least), so long-term it's not so secure
but now we live in the glorious era of near-field communications. after recently being forced to wipe my phone, i had to set up bankid on it anew, and it seems they now require you to use your phone's nfc sensor to scan your passport or national id card. neat!
it's even possible on the iphone. this wouldn't have been possible a few years ago; the british government's brexit eu citizen registration app famously didn't work on iphones because apple didn't want it to. but i guess apple changed course on this eventually.
why did i say "nfc sensor" it's more accurate to say it's a bidirectional radio. well anyway.
however, my iphone is kind of fucked. it already had mobile network reception so unreliable that i gave up entirely on using it. perhaps for some related reason, i couldn't get the nfc scanning process to work at all over multiple attempts, and with two different documents.
so i now know what the fallback process is! and the answer is you phone up your bank, authenticate with bankid on your other phone (i'm sure there's alternatives), answer a lot of security questions, and then they walk you through it again, with the nfc step magically skipped.
what sucks about this new system is if you aren't a swedish citizen, or if your phone doesn't have nfc, it's going to be much more difficult to get bankid. the type of id card available to non-citizen residents does have nfc, but the bankid app doesn't accept it for some reason :/
@hikari It‘s really wild, in Germany we are clumsily attempting to make nfc-id verification a thing but it‘s super scuffed.
I was once forced to set up some bund-id account thing to get the student relief that was already clowned on enough for being over a year late, and it forced the id-verification, but didn‘t accept my passport, because apparently the app only works with a Personalausweis. Which I don’t have because you’re not supposed to need one if you have a passport.