An Unusually Open Identification Number System: The Icelandic Kennitala

Abstract

Over the last few years, heated debate has taken place about the best way to organize everyday identification practices in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and how to deploy identity cards, numbering systems and other forms of civil registration. By contrast, Scandinavian countries have had relatively stable identity regimes for several decades, with a degree of centralization that many in the Anglo-Saxon world would find intrusive. Based on personal numbering, systems like those common in the Nordic countries have attracted little attention from scholars of identification, who have tended to focus on physical tokens of identity, such as passports and identity cards, rather than semantic ones. The most accessible authoritative sources of information on identification numbers tend to be on the websites of national civil registration administrations.¹ There are a few exceptions, such as the sections on numbering in Pierre Piazza’s book on the history of identity cards in France and Karl Jakob Krogness’s article on the history of civil registration in Denmark.² A few other scholars have written about the role of identity numbers in privacy, security or taxation, and these scholars’ principal interest is usually in those allied fields.³