Danes & IT: Anyone can guess your CPR number

05/31/14 • 6 min

Ordinarily don’t get my technology news from the local newspaper sold by the homeless in Denmark, but I did this week. First of all, I learned that you can pay your homeless newspaper seller by text message. If you don’t have loose change, as I often don’t, you can send a text to the newspaper seller’s registration number, along with the amount you want to give him, and the seller gets paid right away.

Secondly, I learned that some homeless people have iPhones. (pause). Not my particular seller, but another reader had written a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying he’d try to buy a paper the previous week, but his seller had been too wrapped up in his iPhone to pay attention to a potential customer. The letter writer was asking if it made sense to spend 20 crowns on a newspaper to help a man....who had a phone worth at least 2000 crowns.

The newspaper had a good response. They said an iPhone was a perfect device for a homeless person. It allowed him to keep all the information he needed in one place – government documents, health records, family photos. And it was a way for him to get phone calls and emails related to housing or jobs. I thought that was a very sensible approach.

Danes have a very sensible approach to IT in general.

The CPR number is a national menace.

That said, I have a great fear that more cybercrime and identity theft is on the way to Denmark. As those of you who live here know, the country’s IT systems are all based around something called the CPR – the central person register. Everyone has a CPR number, and you use it for everything – for banking, for the doctor, for school, for taking books out of the library. My daughter used hers last week to sign up for a Bhangra Dance course during summer vacation.

So, lots of people have your CPR, and if they don’t, it’s pretty easy to guess. Your CPR number is your birthday, plus the century your card was issued in, plus 2 random numbers, plus your gender. Did you know that – men have uneven CPR numbers, and women have even numbers? I did not, until I looked it up.

Anyway, the CPR was probably high tech in 1968 when it was first introduced. But now I think it’s a national menace. Anyone who has your CPR can impersonate you. So far it’s been mostly minimal damage. People give your CPR number when they get caught riding the S-train without a ticket. Or people take out SMS loans using your CPR number. But the potential for trouble is certainly large if the number that controls basically your entire life in Denmark is somehow hacked.

Danes have a very sensible approach to IT in general.

The CPR number is a national menace.

Previous Episode

Danes and Norwegians: Bitter envy and brotherly love

Danes and Norwegians were part of the same country for hundreds of years, and they’re still family. Written Danish and written Norwegian are very similar – so similar that I once tried to find a Danish-Norwegian dictionary and was told there was no such thing. The spoken language is a little more different, but still Danes and Norwegians can understand what the other is saying.

Danes and Norwegians like each other. They care about each other. They even sometimes cheer for each other’s football teams.

But like any family, there’s envy involved. Envy.

For example, there’s envy of each other’s geographical pleasures. Norway has beautiful mountains, great for skiing. Denmark has windswept beaches, which the Norwegians seem to love. Lots of summer holidays in Denmark.

The real envy, of course, is about money. Norway has money, because of North Sea oil.

There is a feeling among some Danes that some of that oil should have been Danish oil. During a meeting to divide up the waters between the two countries in 1963, the Danish negotiator, Per Haakerup was photographed with a glass of whisky in his hand.

The rumor is he was drunk during the meeting, and gave up the Ekofisk oilfield to Norway, which has earned billions of dollars from it.

Next Episode

Danes and Swedes: The world's worst haircuts are Swedish

Hello, and welcome to the How To Live in Denmark podcast. I’m Kay Xander Mellish.

I don’t regret many things in life, but I do regret not going to a party I was invited to almost 14 years ago.

That was in 2000, when I first arrived in Denmark. It was a party to mark the opening of the Ørseund Bridge, which connects Denmark and Sweden. There were no cars on the bridge yet, so you could easily walk or bike between these two countries that had been bitter enemies for hundreds of years. At one point, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden – who were both young and unmarried at time – met and shared a hug and kiss in the center of the bridge, right across the national dividing line.

Now, that’s a party.

I won’t be able to walk or bike across the Øresund Bridge any time soon. A half million cars per month drive over it now, plus a train every 20 minutes, full of commuters.

There are Danes that live in Sweden, and Swedes that work in Denmark. Personally, I love the Swedes who work in Denmark. A lot of them are in service positions – restaurants, shop assistants – and they have revolutionized customer service in Denmark by being....cheerful. They say things like ‘Hello’ and ‘Can I help you?’

This is in contrast to traditional Danish service personnel, whose default approach is “Are you still here? What do you want?”

And then, of course, there are the Danes living in Sweden. At the height of the housing boom, living in Sweden was much cheaper. People could buy a house in Sweden they never could have afforded in Denmark.

The prices have leveled out a bit since, so there are two groups of Danes who live in Sweden. One is people who have new foreign romantic partners – gay or straight – who cannot be admitted to Denmark under the restrictive Danish immigration laws. That basically means anyone from outside the EU, so American, African, Australian, Bolivian. The couple lives in Sweden for a couple of years, gets Swedish residency, and then they can move to Denmark.

The other group of Danes living in Sweden is people who love cars. Denmark, as you know, is bicycle country. Denmark has never had a car industry, which is one of the reason the tax on a new car in Denmark is 180% and more and more streets in Copenhagen are being closed off to cars entirely.

Sweden had a car industry. There’s not much of it left with Saab bankrupt, and Volvo sold to the Chinese, but you can see the influence of that car industry that as soon as you go over the bridge to Malmo. The streets are much wider, even in the newer parts of downtown. Swedish streets are built for cars.

When a young Danish man moves to Sweden, often the very first thing he does is buy a car he never could have afforded in Denmark.

The truth is, there are some ways that the bridge has brought Denmark and Sweden closer together. Danes buy vacation homes in Southern Sweden. Swedes come to attend university in Denmark. Danes go shopping in Sweden, because almost everything is cheaper there. As a matter of fact, the only thing cheaper in Denmark than in Sweden is alcohol.

So, may be closer, but still, Swedes and Danes are very different peoples. Danes still eat rye bread, Swedes eat flatbread. Danes eat Sausages, Swedes eat meatballs.

And Danes, as cold as they may seem to outsiders, are still more outgoing than the Swedes. Among Scandinavians, Danes are sometimes called the Latins of the North. They know how to sit down, open a bottle of wine, and enjoy life.

Swedes, on the other hand, are known as the Prussians of the North. They’re tall. They stand up straight. They follow rules. And the men have terrible haircuts.

Do you know the hairstyle known as the mullet in the United States? It’s that terrible two-level haircut so many men had in the 1990s – the Ziggy Stardust. Short in the front, long in the back. Or, as it’s sometimes said, business in front, party in the back. The mullet, in Denmark, is known as Swedish hair.

To Denmark, Sweden is a big brother with a terrible haircut. He’s regimented, he’s boring, he’s stiff. He can’t dance. There’s a famous saying that inside every Swede is a little policeman trying to get out.

That’s only half the famous saying. Here’s the whole thing. Inside every Swede is a little policeman trying to get out – and inside every Dane, there’s a little criminal trying to get out.

And that’s the How To Live in Denmark podcast for this week. We’re always looking for sponsors for the podcast – we get several thousand listeners every week – so you know an ethical business that would like to have its message here, get in touch. We’re on Facebook at How To Live in Denmark, you can reach us at How To Live in Denmark.com, or you can Tweet us at How2LiveinDK – the 2 is a number. See you next week!