This is an overdue post that I was planning to write already during the summer but I was too busy then, and waaaay too busy in the past few months, since [[I started studying again]].
At the end of June this year, I attended an interesting concert at [[KoncertKirken]] in Copenhagen. It was a memorial concert for NemID. I suppose a lot of people reading this article never heard of it, and that's fair as it is a thing of the past and very specific to Denmark.
The first time I learned about it was when I came to Denmark to do my Bachelor degree in September 2016. One of the things that I was amazed about Denmark was how much digitalization there is. Already starting with the public transportation. On every bus stop and train station there were screens displaying information about the coming buses/trains and their precise arrival times in minutes. The screens in buses were showing what are the next stops. Then, there was the whole Rejsekort system allowing travelers to use a Travel Card (that's what Rejsekort means) to start and end their journey by taping it on the blue points standing on train stations and inside the buses, the procedure commonly known as "checking in" and "checking out". The price of the journey would be then calculated based on the number of zones travelled.
Healthcare in Denmark was also very digitalized. You, as a patient, could make all the doctor's appointments online. Then, when arriving at the clinic or hospital, you had to scan your health card, aka the "yellow card", to check in for the appointment. When going to different doctors, they all had your info because of some centralized patient database. When you had some medicine prescribed they could see it, you could see it when going to sundhed.dk website; and the pharmacies could see it, because they would ask you to scan your health card there as well, so that they can get your info.
I could probably mention more examples of the technological advancements in Denmark, but I want to focus on the one that prompted this article - the NemID system.
I wouldn't say that NemID was as jaw-dropping for me as the other cases of digitalization I described, but it was definitely present in and supporting many online activities I was doing in Denmark. NemID was a common login solution that any person living in Denmark had to use to sign in to government websites, such as borger.dk (a portal for citizens) or skat.dk (Danish tax office), digital mailbox eboks.dk, online banking systems, and other online services provided by Danish companies.
The way it worked was based on