Having someone&#x27;s personal identity nummer (personnummer) is in itself enough to do a lot of damage.<p>Many Swedish online shops will happily send you goods along with an invoice that you pay later. The invoice option is often only available if you provide your personnummer - which as I mentioned is public information, a phone call away - and have the goods sent to the address tied to that number. If you live in a house with a mailbox outdoors, a thief could order stuff to your address and empty the mailbox before you. &quot;Stuff&quot; could also be things like mobile phone subscriptions and whatnot.<p>Or, having your personnummer, someone could send a form to the tax agency to have your official address changed! I believe they do send a letter to the old address saying the address has been changed to &lt;new address&gt;. But there&#x27;s time to do bad stuff in between the time of the change and your discovery of it. (If, indeed, you do discover it. You might be traveling somewhere, a fact that might&#x27;ve been gleaned from your social media activity.)<p>And, as breakingcups points out above, even if it were the case that sound security procedures were implemented in Sweden, that wouldn&#x27;t matter much for the numerous non-Swedish services most Swedes use every day.<p>Anyway -- people being able to do stuff in your name is just one thing. I don&#x27;t want the whole world to know my address, or marital status, or date of birth, etc - period. It&#x27;s about privacy.