Icelandic identification number

The Icelandic identification number (Icelandic: kennitala, abbreviated kt.) is a unique national identification number used by the Icelandic government to identify individuals and organisations in Iceland, administered by the Registers Iceland. ID numbers are issued to Icelandic citizens at birth, and to foreign nationals resident in Iceland upon registration.[1] They are also issued to corporations and institutions.

Number composition

ID numbers are composed of ten digits. For a personal ID number, the first six of these are the individual's date of birth in the format DDMMYY.[1] The seventh and eighth digits are randomly chosen when the ID number is allocated, ranging from 20 to 99 (with some exceptions). The ninth is a check digit, and the tenth indicates the century of the individual's birth: '9' for 1900–1999, '0' for 2000–2099. ID numbers are often written with a hyphen following the first six digits, e.g. 120174-3399.
D1D2M1M2Y1Y2R1R2PC
D = day, M = Month, Y = year, R = random, P = parity, C = century.

The check digit equation is:

The consequence of this design is that at most 80 people can be born on the same day. The exact same formula is used for the identification numbers of organisations and companies, instead of the date of birth the initial registration date is used and then the number 4 is added to the first digit to makes sure there are no conflicts with individuals.

Use

The system is similar to that employed by some other European countries, but Iceland makes unusually extensive and public use of its ID numbers, with businesses and educational institutions eschewing internal identification numbers in favour of the national system, and its use being mandated in banking transactions. Furthermore, online banking services in Iceland offer a lookup service to check names against numbers. Because of their public nature, ID numbers are not used for authentication. The completeness of the National Register has eliminated the need for the country to conduct a regular census: population statistics can be obtained by simply querying the database.

gollark: I wonder how hard/expensive it'd be to run your own channel on the satellite system if there are THAT many.
gollark: We have exciting TV like "BBC Parliament".
gollark: Analog TV got shut down here ages ago.
gollark: So I guess if you consider license costs our terrestrial TV is *not* free and costs a bit more than Netflix and stuff. Oops.
gollark: - it funds the BBC, but you have to pay it if you watch *any* live TV, or watch BBC content online- it's per property, not per person, so if you have a license, and go somewhere without a license, and watch TV on some of your stuff, you are breaking the law (unless your thing is running entirely on battery power and not mains-connected?)- it costs about twice as much as online subscription service things- there are still black and white licenses which cost a third of the priceBut the enforcement of it is even weirder than that:- there are "TV detector vans". The BBC refuses to explain how they actually work in much detail. With modern TVs I don't think this is actually possible, and they probably can't detect iPlayer use, unless you're stupid enough to sign up with your postcode (they started requiring accounts some years ago).- enforcement is apparently done by some organization with almost no actual legal power (they can visit you and complain, but not *do* anything without a search warrant, which is hard to get)- so they make up for it by sending threatening and misleading letters to try and get people to pay money

See also

References
  1. "ID Numbers". Þjóðskrá Íslands. Retrieved 2017-09-07.
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