A Brave New e-World Over a decade has sped by since I first started using my Estonian id card. It became an indispensable tool for me since it helped save time, money, and nerves. I could access my bank accounts, my medical records, my tax statements and best of all I could sign my documents from Estonia as well as from other countries including the US. I assumed that the rest of Europe or at the very least, the US was doing this also. It didnt take long to figure out that no one knew what I was talking about when I revisited the US in 2004. It seems that Estonia today has a 12 year head start in this technology. Id grown accustomed to getting documents signed in a matter of minutes rather than via snail mail that took weeks to complete. Back in North America, it felt as if I was stepping back in time. Now in 2014 the news is spreading about a technology that so many more people could benefit from. Recently the youthful PM of Estonia, Taavi Rõivas visited the US with a delegation of young, IT and business savvy Estonians to officially present two id cards to Mr Steve Jurvetson and Mr Tim Draper, the first Americans to hold e-residency in Estonia. The PM kept a tight schedule meeting with VP Biden and other top leaders such as the members of Nasdaq’s top management team. Rõivas also made a presentation at the Atlantic Council think tank and visited the offices of renowned technology companies in Silicon Valley area, including Google, Tesla, Microsoft and an Estonian-born start-up GrabCAD. How safe is a digital signature anyway? It boils down to proper authentication certificates and software that recognizes the certificates as well as the card. The reliability of the network in which the document is circulated must also be very high and the signing of the document must not be done on the open internet. Im not any kind of expert in this technology but what I can say is that I never had any problems and still dont, using a digital signature. Ive also never had a single hacking problem with my Estonian bank account or credit cards. I have however, had two instances where my credit card and bank account were hacked in the US.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 08:59:38 +0000
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