Field Notes

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We Know Your Identity Number

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Ian Watson’s 2005 feature in The Reykjavík Grapevine on Iceland’s kennitala system and the public accessibility of Þjóðskrá, the Icelandic national registry. The saved snapshot is the magazine’s page, with the .raw.html companion kept as the provenance copy.

What the article establishes

A document of both a system and a defense of it:

  • At the time, anyone with an Icelandic bank login — most of the adult population — could search the national registry by name and receive the person’s kennitala and street address, or search in reverse.
  • Icelandic law (2000/77) restricts kennitala use to contexts where it is necessary for secure identification, and Persónuvernd polices that line strictly (it ruled a bookstore could not demand a kennitala for a return when a name sufficed).
  • The article’s counter-intuitive argument: openness is the anti-fraud mechanism. Every official act triggers a letter to the registered address, so a fraudulent bank account or credit card announces itself; it is the American SSN’s privateness that makes it valuable to thieves, because there is no authoritative public way to check that a name, number, and address belong together.
  • The author concludes: “the more open the kennitala system, the harder it is to compromise it.”

Limitations

A 2005 magazine feature, not a peer-reviewed study; its causal claim about identity theft is argued, not measured. The open name search it describes has since been closed: Registers Iceland’s current site states that individuals cannot be searched in the National Registry, while commercial API access to register data (for paying customers, including bulk) continues through licensed channels. The defense therefore addresses a settlement that no longer fully exists.

Significance for the wiki

The strongest available statement of the “transparency as security” counter-case against the vault’s exposure critique — and Iceland as the country that once ran the experiment Sweden is often accused of running: a fully name-searchable population registry. Its subsequent tightening is evidence about where the experiment ended. Anchors the Icelandic row of Public-by-default identity in international comparison.

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