In Sweden 6 of 10 digits of personal ID is public by law

This makes you vulnerable to identity theft. Swedish residents have no legal right to protect their personal identifying information (PII) which includes the first 6 digits of the 10 digits (AAMMDD-xxxx) of Swedish IDs. Except is if you have a protected identity. Following is the response I received from one of the credit reporting agencies that I contacted.

“We are a credit reporting agency with permission from the Data Inspectorate (Datainspektionen). The data in our database are and should be a reflection of public databases retrieved from authorities such as tax authorities (Skattemyndigheten), payment remarks and debt collecting agencies (Kronofogdemyndigheten), and the bureau of statistics (SCB). Public data means that anyone can contact the respective government authority and get the same information there. We are by the Credit Information Act (Kreditupplysningslagen) required to make changes in our database to correct faults, but you have no right to be omitted from the register. All residents in Sweden who are over the age of 16 are included.

Protected Identity is the only way to hide the address and other personal information with the authorities, and thus also with us, and it may be issued through the tax or police authorities. Once an identity has been protected the data is hidden automatically in our system.”

This was in response to the following request I made.

I would like to kindly request that you do NOT share my personal information with third parties that make money from my personal identifying information, an example is ‘birthday.se”. Due to the sharing of my PII the first 6 digits of my Swedish ID is public, consequences are that it makes me vulnerable to identity fraud.

Can you please confirm that this is done. If not would be be kind enough to give me enough information to understand why not?