The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe (opens in new tab)

The digital systems work pretty well.

The digital prescriptions are definitely convenient, especially as you can get them renewed via e-mail to your doctor and thus skip any visitation bills.

I also still remember my amazement when it took me literally 5 minutes to register a new company online, 10 years ago. Not that much different from opening a Twitter account.

An even older system is the tax one, where everything is automated and I don't have to even think about it. I can just annually review the automatically calculated data and press accept to get some money back.

My girlfriend is Estonian, and she finds life incredibly complicated in both the UK and Sweden-

I just asked, she misses that there was never a need for a government office, no queuing and everything was centrally managed, as long as she has her ID card and her "pin".

She is mentioning the arduous processes we have for validating identity in Sweden and looking up financial history.

Part of me feels like this is a double edged sword, but she seems to genuinely miss it.

Would it be easier to take seriously if there were verification of email address? It's not like there's any requirement for identity verification before provisioning of an email account.

I also want more digitalization, BUT. If this has to cost my own privacy then I would like to have the time to think about it. I would not like to see my personal/financial data online because a hacker found a hole in the system, or something like that.

Ah, and by the way, what people don't seem to understand is that it's also thanks to laws about privacy that Germany (and Europe in General) is funding more and more companies. People don't use Google Analytics due to that most of the time. Microsoft had to open a data center in Frankfurt, and so on, and so on. All this has diverse implications: hiring a company that keeps data in Germany. Who does it? German companies (or European companies). And money flows as it should. The country grows, people learn software, new jobs are created, and so on.

I would be not so hasty about changing privacy laws - they are there for a (good) reason (actually, more than one). Maybe in the next 10-15 years, when European (and German) software companies are more stable, then yes why not? But now, I am not so sure about it.

> Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy.

I think you are missing the elephant in the room: our (German) complete and utter incompetence when it comes to software development.

Declaring taxes for my business still involves mailing many dead trees around the country, and I hate it. But what's the alternative, sinking billions of euros into a public software project that might be as crappy as Toll Collect?

I haven’t seen the video, by my feeling is that there’s no need to “review” any e-voting system, since the very concept is irredeemably flawed. If a person can in any way prove to a third party what they voted on, then the system is wide open to coercion of voters. If I can e-vote, then someone could force me at gunpoint to log in and e-vote to their liking instead of mine. If the system allows changing my vote later with some sort of password, they can simply take my password away from me. If changing one’s vote is hard, like having to actually going to a poll booth, then they could make sure that I am either watched or made unavoidably busy for the duration. I could easily see these techniques being deployed at scale towards more easily cowed sections of the citizenry, like the poor.

The reviewers found terrible opsec, lack of an appropriate threat model, and demonstrated the feasibility attacks both on the vote counting server and on the voting client.

For more information you can watch the video I linked above or read a summary here: https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/

E-voting is flawed by design. The voting secret is lost.

(What is to stop the husband to control who the wife votes for, or vice versa?)