| In Italy we have a worse version of what you described. 1. An ID card you can use to access some services (carta di identità digitale) 2. Another card you can use to access healthcare related services and some other services (carta nazionale servizi) 3. SPID: your digital ID to access yet some other services, and also some of the above services. It is not released by the government but by other authorized entities such as banks, the national mail service and others. You need to pay a small fee for the verification, and sometimes an annual fee. There are different SPID levels but no one actually knows the difference between them. 4. PEC (posta elettronica certificata): a digitally signed email box you can use to send/receive documents, invoices, etc. or simply messages. Those are legally attributed to you and you can use it to talk to government agencies instead of sending registered paper mail. As SPID it is issued by an authorized third party. We also have some smartphone apps that work as a combination of the above, and need some of the above to work. As you can see it is a mess, a waste of tax money and we will need to waste more money in the future to make this mess work. Nice :) Edit: and by the way when you need something really important all the above are useless: you either need to start hopping from a public office to another (we have a lot of them) and/or go to a notary (a kind of medieval bureaucrat you pay a lot of money to sign and stamp sheets of paper) |