• Leon@pawb.social
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    3 days ago

    Back when I spent the night at a Swedish airport I spent most of the morning shooting the shit with a lady coming back home from some tropical place. She’d previously worked in a government position, and after clearing up some gender confusion, she told me that before 1990 the final digits in our personal identity numbers used to correspond to where you were born as well as your gender. Nowadays it’s just your gender.

    Our “person numbers” are essentially your date of birth combined with 4 digits, YYYYMMDD-XXXX.

    Thus if you’ve a PID looking like 19890221-0271, you can infer that the person is a man born in Stockholm on the 21st of February 1989. This isn’t a valid PID however, as it doesn’t pass the Luhn algorithm.

    Minor segue; trans people can and do get their PID changed to reflect them being man/woman rather than the gender assigned at birth. Non-binary people are unfortunately not represented.

    Back in 1990 they changed the “place of birth” bits of the PID and is now assigned randomly. Up until then there were also a range of digits assigned if you were born outside of Sweden and had emigrated. Perhaps in the future they’ll do away with the gendering and just have the numbers assigned randomly.

    Or they might not.