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replace it? SSN has one purpose, and that is to identify our national social benefits account. that's it, and it works for that. but we don't need a national I

replace it? SSN has one purpose, and that is to identify our national social benefits account. that's it, and it works for that. but we don't need a national ID. at all. the tracking that will most certainly accompany that is diametrically opposed to the concept of a free people. banks take a risk with every account and every transaction. it's up to those institutions to figure out how to manage that risk, without obligating all americans to give up their hard fought and valuable constitutional right to privacy to make it easy for them.

dredmorbius 9y ago
SSN in fact does not work well for that. There are fewer than 1 billion unique SSNs. Yes, there are 8 digits, but there are significant ranges of invalid values. The Social Security Administration will run out of numbers within a few decades, at most. It's one thing to have enough values to assign everybody. It's another for the namespace to be so densely populated that any randomly-chosen value is likely to be valid. This ... creates problems. There are no check or validity values within SSNs. There's a structure to the digits (Area, Group, and Serial numbers), but even those are at best vague, there've been three regimes of assignment (< 1972, 1972-2011, and 2011+), and other than "this value isn't within a validly assigned range", there are, again, no validity checks. Provisions for being issued a new SSN are at best cumbersome. That's just off the top of my head. I've worked in large-scale data analysis and processing, though years ago, and there are long and detailed discussions of the limitations and failures of SSNs even just as account identifiers. Using them outside the SSA only compounds those issues.
- clairity 9y ago
  you make good points. in my head, i had simply equated "works for that" with "good enough for now". it seems even for just social security, the SSN numbering system could use an update, integrating everything we've learned about identity schemes in the last 100 years.

dredmorbius 9y ago

SSN in fact does not work well for that. There are fewer than 1 billion unique SSNs. Yes, there are 8 digits, but there are significant ranges of invalid values. The Social Security Administration will run out of numbers within a few decades, at most. It's one thing to have enough values to assign everybody. It's another for the namespace to be so densely populated that any randomly-chosen value is likely to be valid. This ... creates problems. There are no check or validity values within SSNs. There's a structure to the digits (Area, Group, and Serial numbers), but even those are at best vague, there've been three regimes of assignment (< 1972, 1972-2011, and 2011+), and other than "this value isn't within a validly assigned range", there are, again, no validity checks. Provisions for being issued a new SSN are at best cumbersome. That's just off the top of my head. I've worked in large-scale data analysis and processing, though years ago, and there are long and detailed discussions of the limitations and failures of SSNs even just as account identifiers. Using them outside the SSA only compounds those issues.

clairity 9y ago
you make good points. in my head, i had simply equated "works for that" with "good enough for now". it seems even for just social security, the SSN numbering system could use an update, integrating everything we've learned about identity schemes in the last 100 years.