It is well known and no one in Sweden seems to give a shit which boggles my mind as a Swede. Anyway, it was nice but it has only worked well beucause of Swedens low crime rate historically.

Now, with increasing criminality due to mass immigration there is only a question of time until these services becomes illegal I think.

I have personally been subjected to a stalker, so it will be nice when these services disappear for me personally but I honestly think the utility of them are great. If you find a wallet for example, you can easily find this person and call them due to these services. But for now, the only way to be truly anonymous in Sweden is to get a protected identity which is pretty much impossible to get or to buy some land and switch your home address to that place. People can still get all the properties you own with your "Personnummer" (social security number) but it is harder, less known, takes more time etc.

It's a well known site in Sweden. I remember using it at least 10-13 years back. A quick Swedish googling found me a dozens of sites offering similar services. One even offered credit rating assessment at 1.5 dollar after the search.

I'm not well read on the issue but a lot of things are digitalized in Sweden. It's a cashless society, where everyone have a personal number that they can use for government service & signing up for phone contracts. The tax institute (like USA:s IRS) sends their deductions out digitally, and AFAIK they have a very open API a lot of digital services in Sweden use for online identification of a private person. So I assume those pages probably use the tax-institutes API for personal information, and then other APIs (such as real-estate portals) to tie information together.

So, the government knows every purchase they make, tracks everything they do, and can take it all away whenever it wants? No thanks. And what about homeless and old people, are they disenfranchised too? A cashless society controlled by a government or a corporation means a powerless society.

Norway has had similar tax return approval by text messaging for almost 20 years.

I don't know what your percention of Norway is, but having moved around a bit and currently being based here, I see that Scandinavians have a different relationship with governments and corporations than in many other countries. For a start, it's not primarily seen as an adversarial relationship. It's more of the people, for the people. Not perfect, but Scandinavian societies rely on a high level of trust and it works, for now. There's been an increase in data protection recently, which I think is needed as it's a bit too transparent at times.

The government doesn't know about every purchase you make but there is a lot of data sharing. However there is a lot more consumer protection and less power lies with unaccountable corporations than in many other capitalist countries, where corporations have almost free reign and have powerful influence over society, economy & politic. For example, credit scoring is relatively new here and is a lot less intense than other countries. In places like the UK/USA, credit scoring companies control your financial possibilities. Much less so in Scandinavia.

There is a small number of people for whom a cashless society poses problems, but it's probably less, and a different subset, than you think. Those I know of through association tend to be those who suffer severe mental health issues. Old people have bank accounts, debit cards and mobile phones for digital transactions. As for homeless people, there are less of them in Scandinavia than in other countries. Almost all of them will still have a bank account and a mobile phone and be receiving state funds digitally. (Homelessness is not defined as living on the street, almost all the homeless are in temporary housing.)

Besides, you still can pay with real money in most places, you just have to choose the right line at the exit. Not all of them take cash. For us that has no problems, card is so much easier to use but there are a lot of people that can't handle the tech and they should be able to buy things too.

All this is marketed as better for crime prevention, less bank/store robbery. Ofcourse this only pushes the cost on the individual in the end though. If you can't rob the store, you can still find valuables in private houses with much lower security. Or just stop any youth on the street. Chances are they have an expensive phone if nothing else.

Good point, I should have mentioned that cash is still accepted almost everywhere.

I think the crime thing might not be a direct link, as a bank robber and an opportunistic street thief are probably different people. There is less opportunistic crime than elsewhere as a big driver of crime is people's situation which, in general, aren't bad enough to resort to crime. I'm still unnerved by the lax security everywhere, e.g. the tiny bolts and padlocks in common storage areas in apartment blocks, which are an increasing target for thieves as they are easy pickings.

Another benefit is BankID, which makes fraud & identity theft is a lot more difficult as there is an easy and secure way of identifying yourself online. Even with somebody's ID number you can't impersonate them in most situations. This is something I've really appreciated working in the finance industry. The old way of calling up and accepting people's identity purely on trust never sat well with my non-Scandinavian mind.

On the other hand, BankID has really taken of as the main fraud avenue. It's so much easier to just look someone up, punch in their personal number, start a log in to the bank and then call them up saying someone is trying to steal their money, they need to stop it by verifying their identity with BankID. This instead logs the attacker in to the bank with full access. Now you just need to start a transfer to your bank account and tell them the ID failed, try again. Money is yours, now just make it jump between a few more temporary accounts and let your friend take out the cash at the ATM.

This is not unique to BankID though. Voice phishing is a global problem and independent of authentication method.

What makes you think other governments don't have that kind of information or can easily access it from their friends in bigcorp Inc?

tax returns themselves are public in sweden and you can literally find out what anyone has paid in taxes by contacting the authorities.

Sweden has a different attitude to this kind of information that is fundamentally more about transparency than privacy, so it's not perceived as an issue.

yes, it is well known. I just see it as a digital versin of the phone book.

And there are even more extreme versions, like ratsit.se

where you can pay to get credit information on anyone.

Personally I think that what ratsit does is probably too far, and maybe it shouldn't be legal.

But in general I like our "public information" system, that lots of government information is available to every citizen, I find the benefits of being able to check what the government and those with power does (journalism would be way harder without this), outweights the negatives.

You clearly have never been the target of abuse or a stalker. Nothing less fun than when someone on a dating app in Sweden messages you saying "I know exactly who you are" and you know they can find out where you live in less than five minutes. If it works for 90% of people in Sweden, that's good but they should really make it easier to get your information hidden. Phonebooks of old times only had your number not your full address, the type of car you drive, who is your sambo etc

It should be noted that when you buy credit information from a site like Ratsit, the person being queried will receive a notice to this effect, including the identity of the person/business making the query.

It's not even the only one, there is a bunch of them that gives different levels of information. Partly because the equivalent of social security numbers are public information in Sweden.

There are apps for Eniro and Hitta that could tell you if an incoming call is from a known callcenter for example. Not sure they still work after google tightened up security.

I'm always amazed I can't find someones phone number outside Sweden when I need one. Here it's just a few clicks away. Sure you can ask to be removed from their register but most wants to be there.

As crime perpetually gets worse in Sweden in the coming decades, it's practically a guarantee their culture will change when it comes to tolerating such privacy violations. They'll begin to lock down formerly open aspects of their culture.