People in Denmark Confident in Digital Communication with the Public Sector

04-12-2020

A new survey from Statistics Denmark shows that people in Denmark trust digital public services and are content with the public sector’s digital solutions.

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Since 2001, Statistics Denmark have investigated use of ICT in the Danish population annually. The new survey from 2020 offers insight into the population’s use of and satisfaction with the public sector’s digital solutions.

People in Denmark Trust Public Sector Solutions and Data Processing

The report shows that people in Denmark generally feel safe when they communicate digitally with the public sector, and that they trust the public sector’s digital solutions.

Specifically, the survey finds that the national Digital Post service is used by 94 percent of the population over the age of 15. Of these users, 92 percent feel safe in communicating with the authorities through the platform, which is the same result as in 2019.

Moreover, 81 percent of respondents trust that Danish authorities handle their personal information carefully.

Improving Trust

The numbers also show a potential for improvement. Eight in ten respondents express that their trust in the handling of personal information would increase if they had a higher degree of knowledge of the information stored about them by the public sector.

Together with Local Government Denmark and the Danish Regions, the Agency for Digitisation is currently working on establishing an expanded personal overview for the individual citizen of the information held by the public sector about them. This personal overview will be established on the citizens’ portal borger.dk.

We are of course very satisfied with citizens’ confidence in the public sector’s digital solutions and our handling of their personal information. This trust is crucial for the success of the digital public sector in Denmark.
Among other interesting highlights, the new report from Statistics Denmark shows that citizens with high trust in the public sector’s handling of data are more likely to use digital healthcare solutions and check up on their health data online. This clearly shows that the continued trust of citizens is pivotal for successful digital public services.

Signe Caspersen, Deputy Director of Danish Agency for Digitisation

Report on use of ICT in the Danish population

Statistics Denmark collect data on the use of ICT in the Danish population every year. For the 2020 report, the data was collected by conducting phone interviews and online surveys during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020.

The results are based on approximately 5,800 respondents from a representative sample of the Danish population between 15 and 89 years of age.

The report is currently only available in Danish but can be found here on Statistics Denmark's website

NemID

Nine in ten Danish residents hold a NemID – the national eID in Denmark – which is needed to access digital services, communicate with public authorities, and access online banking.

NemID is based on two-factor authentication with a variety of tokens. One of these tokens is the NemID code app, which was launched for smartphones in 2018. More than half of the respondents had used the code app to authenticate when logging in. The app is particularly popular among people under the age of 45. However, uptake among the elderly is also rising steadily: 40 percent of the 65-to-74-year-olds and a quarter of the 75-to-89-year-olds have used or are using the code app.

Digital Public Services

Satisfaction with services on authorities’ websites has risen over the last couple of years. In 2020, 91 percent of the citizens who had accessed an authority’s website or used a self-service solution were satisfied with the digital public services. This is an increase from 88 percent in 2019 and 87 percent in 2017.

Most users experience that public self-service solutions are easy to use. Of those who have submitted information to the public sector digitally – e.g. through a self-service solution – 72 percent found procedures either easy or very easy to use.

Digital assistance at libraries and citizens’ service centres

Of all the respondents, 23 percent needed help when they last used a digital self-service solution. It was the oldest and the youngest citizens who needed assistance the most, with 30 percent of the 75-to-89-year-olds and 30 percent of the 15-to-24-year-olds needing help.

In Denmark, libraries and the citizens’ service centres offer assistance for digital self-service solutions and the Digital Post service. Of the respondents who needed help in this year’s study, 61 percent knew about this option.