Switzerland has an awesome electoral system [1]. Instead of being ruled by a president or a prime minister who can be polarising, divisive, or selective, Switzerland has an Executive Council.<p>The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson.<p>This means that different social and political priorities get implemented in turn. It also means the way the government works is more cooperative, because each council member, including the chairperson, knows there will be a new chairperson next year.<p>So, if a pro-business candidate places 1st, and an environment candidate 2nd, and a social welfare candidate 3rd, and a libertarian candidate 4th, it is in all their interests to cooperate and create legislation that serves all of their interests as much as possible. Instead of disregarding the environment, the pro-business council member is encouraged to develop green business initiatives that will be supported for the full 4 year term under the different chairs.<p>The system creates a leadership team that looks for win-win, rather than a sole victor who can abuse majority rule.<p>[1]. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)</a>
Quite a few people who voted against this did so purely because they didn’t want private companies controlling the system.<p>If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.
Switzerland has this in its constitution:<p>Article 13: Right to Privacy<p>1. All persons have the right to receive respect for their private and family life,
home, and secrecy of the mails and telecommunications.<p>2. All persons have the right to be protected against the abuse of personal data.<p>Also the constitution can be only changed by voting.
Really proud of this result; the failsafe once again has done its job against heavy lobbying.<p>There was so much misinformation around mostly due to lack of technical understanding (e.g. "it's a digital passport!") and the (yellow) press heavily pushed for a yes.
This sounds like the Italian digital ID: required by the government, managed by multiple companies. It’s called SPID.<p>It’s usually free, but there’s also certified email (PEC) that costs from 5€ to 30€ per year. Also required by the government in some cases and also offered by a small number of companies.<p>Does Estonia offer their digital IDs directly?
Meanwhile in Germany: "Hey, wouldn't it be so swell if people needed to provide their ID when signing up for email accounts and instant messengers?"
Hopefully the next time Swiss people will have a chance to vote for an electronic ID (legislative process takes time, so thinking in timeframe of 3-5y), the solution will contain some parts of a self-sovereign identity / DID [1] with the state as original issuer and trusted multiparty keyholder in case the self-sovereign is to hard for folks. It would fit quite well with their other decentralized systems.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifiers" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifiers</a>
I’m a bit sad the referendum passed as the law was creating a regulated environment were anyone could start an ID provider and other providers would be forced to interoperate. Basically it mandated a distributed protocol. The alternative to my dream of having a cooperative of my choice handling my metadata seems will be to have the state know everything about me. Let’s see how it will play out. Maybe we will put some privacy by design concepts in the implementation.<p>On the plus side all the lobbyist that were involved in this story have been recalled to order.
Good for Switzerland! The only reason US (or maybe other countries) out source their gov contract to private companies is because it makes kickbacks for their friends. Public sector ought to be separated from private. And electronic ID may be counter productive for a democratic government.
I haven't read the details of the proposal, but I'll compare it to my ideal situation. I'm in the US so my view is influenced that way. I loathe that my Social Security number and/or signature is the key to my identity. I think every individual should be able to choose how they are "identified". If you choose to be identified by the government system, fine. If you choose to be identified by Equifax, fine. If I choose to be identified by a gpg private/public key pair, I should also have that right.
Did the title change because from the article I see it as “ Digital identity scheme shot down by voters over data privacy concerns” ... which is much different than HN “Switzerland bites against electronic ID systems provided by private companies”
The caption under the photograph at the top of the article reads "The government has called for joint efforts to push ahead with digitalisation despite voters' rejection of the eID on Sunday."<p>So much for the will of the people.
"... almost no government has the IT capacity and resources to single-handedly develop an eID quickly and to the appropriate standards." Bullshit. We're talking identity management here. Any government that can't handle that internally doesn't deserve to exist. What that's really about is feathering the nests of tech industry donors (and/or the non-tech middlemen or middlewomen who seem to grow like weeds around the tech sector). A handful of IdM SMEs with serious field experience could set it up in six months: assuming they had sufficient backing from their government employer to overcome static at Layer 8 of the OSI Model, you know,"politics".
Almost every politician wants more power over citizens. That is why a binding popular referendum is necessary in cases like these. Congrats to the Swiss people, I am a little bit jealous.
This is bad populism.<p>It's understandable people fear Google/FB etc., but an entity contracted by the state to do digital ID services is not going to be selling your phone number if doing so would put them out of business and land them in jail.<p>Sadly, the notion of basic digital ID would be very useful for so many things and maybe even help with privacy if content providers switched to this kind id vs. social logins.<p>Ironically, these 'government IDs' may be a vanguard in the fight for privacy because they establish a privacy-based alternative that doesn't currently exist.<p>(Edit) There are already private institutions that manage ID data (Finance, Health) no our behalf and generally we are not concerned. (Although VISA is owned by banks and that's a concern). In Canada, they have temporarily allocated ID literally to the banking system - you can login to the gov. tax portal using your banking login. So, de-facto, the banks provide ID services to gov. already.<p>It's irrational populism. ID services are sensitive obviously, but governments already deal in such types of sensitive information and there's no reason 3rd parties can't manage those services with the right kind of oversight.