Mon.service-public.fr

» see mon.service-public.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey opened e-Devlet Kapısı on 18 December 2008 with 22 services behind one login. France opened Mon.service-public.fr a few weeks later, in the first months of 2009, with the same idea and a French name for it. That coincidence is the whole reason this one is legible to me at all. I have used the Turkish one for years and it takes no imagination to picture the French one, because the problem both were built against is identical: a citizen has fifteen relationships with the state and no two of them know each other exists.

The builder was the Direction générale de la modernisation de l'État, the modernization agency that ran French administrative reform in that period. The account let you register to vote, report a change of address to several administrations at once, declare a death, or start a business or an association, all from a browser. It also carried a porte-documents, a personal document store for official paperwork, which at the time was a genuinely ambitious thing for a government to offer.

Uptake was real rather than spectacular. There were 700,000 accounts in June 2010 and more than a million by the end of September that year. The roadmap talked about filing tax returns through it and about SMS reminders for administrative deadlines, and the login already used a code sent to your phone, which put French e-government ahead of a lot of banks on that particular point.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the safe ~

The porte-documents is the part worth remembering. A state handing citizens a place to keep their own official documents is a statement about who the records belong to, and in 2009 the private sector had barely started offering anything comparable. It was also the part that made the shutdown messy, because a storage promise is a much harder thing to retire than a form.

Holders had until 1 July 2016 to move what they had into the replacement account. After that the contents were deleted. There is no archive, no grace period reported anywhere, and no way to know how much of it was actually rescued.

~ the migration that read like a scam ~

France merged the personal account into service-public.fr, the general public-information portal, so the two halves became one site. Sensible on an org chart. Confusing to a million people who had to be told by email that their government account was being closed and they needed to click through and make a new one.

That email carries every marker of a phishing attempt regardless of who actually sent it, and French consumer sites spent the spring of 2016 publishing explainers confirming that no, this one is real. Years later there were still people asking whether the closure notice had been a fraud attempt. A government that spends seven years teaching citizens to be suspicious of unexpected mail about their accounts cannot then send one and expect to be believed.

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