In Estonia, a newborn baby can sometimes have an online digital identity number issued by the state before their parents have settled on a name.
The small Baltic country is seen as a world leader in making it easy for citizens to access public services online.
The country introduced “i-voting” all the way back in 2005. That doesn’t mean walking to a polling booth and submitting a preference on an electronic voting machine. Estonian citizens can use a secure pin code to vote in elections on their laptop or desktop, from the comfort of their home or abroad.
The country digitised its healthcare system in 2008. An online portal tied to digital ID numbers allows people to order refills of routine medical prescriptions.
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You can use that same state-backed online portal to apply to get married or divorced, start a business, complete tax returns or change your name. The list goes on – to the point Estonia says it has become a fully “digital” state.
Coming out from under Soviet rule in 1991, the idea of shifting public administration online guarded against the corruption that permeated the paper-based system that had gone before.
The digital ID number was introduced in 2002 and is tied to a physical identity card, which is mandatory for all Estonian citizens.
Uptake was low initially, but improved after i-voting was rolled out. In the most recent parliamentary elections, about half of the votes were cast online. The remainder voted in person.
The Estonian state built public trust by offering services online gradually, explains Sandra Särav-Tammus, deputy secretary general for economy and innovation at the ministry of economic affairs.
“We always recommend to other governments, if you want to digitalise, you cannot do everything at the same time,” she says.
It was better to pick one or two early test cases with obvious benefits. “Be transparent about everything,” Särav-Tammus says.
“We made this decision that the [online] identity is going to be built by the public sector.”
Banks, hospitals, doctors and other private companies then made themselves compatible, so people could use their online ID to access those services.
You get a notification when a passport or driving licence is due for renewal. Nearly nine out of 10 birth registrations are completed online, often from the hospital bed.
Army reservists tick a box so their employer automatically receives an alert when they have been called up for a week of training.
Public transport in the capital, Tallinn, is free for residents. The transport operator runs an automatic check against the state’s online portal, to confirm those availing of a travel card still have a registered address in the city. That check will provide an answer without releasing individuals’ addresses.
There is a fair degree of transparency built into the system. Estonians have to approve a public institution or company accessing or checking their data, and can view a traceable log of the organisations that have done so. If they spot something suspicious, they can request an explanation.
The last service to go digital was the divorce application process in late 2024.
The most important government data sets, such as registries of the population and businesses, criminal, pension and treasury records, are backed up outside of Estonia too, in what they call a “data embassy” in a secure location in Luxembourg.
Johanna-Kadri Kuusk, an adviser on digital transformation in the e-Estonia briefing centre, says this was to guard against the “worst-case scenario”: an invasion by neighbouring Russia.
“Let’s say we’re being bombed, physical server rooms here are being destroyed. What would happen to our digital state, right? ... We have copies of our most important registries that the state needs to function,” she told The Irish Times.
It became possible to submit a marriage application online in 2022, and Särav-Tammus got to see how that process worked first hand. “I was very much looking forward to my ring. I had been waiting for it for five years.”
The senior civil servant was back from a work trip and heard her partner Thomas call out from the sittingroom: “‘Tell me, are you marrying me or no?’ I said: ‘yes, of course, you know it’. It was very like us to do it at home, not with a big audience,” she says.
A couple of months later she was enjoying a glass of wine in the Frankfurt Airport lounge and decided to apply for their marriage certificate.
She logged on to her portal with her pin code, tapped in his digital ID as well, and about 20 clicks later he got a notification on his account, informing him that somebody wanted to marry him.
The last legal step involved the couple signing the certificate in front of witnesses.
“This you still do physically, which is still nice,” she says.
