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> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity di
by bastawhiz 4y ago
> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally.
There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid).
The only challenge is knowing whether the number belongs the the person sitting in front of the computer. There's no way to stop a kid from using their parent's number. Which is sort of the whole problem with SSNs in the first place: their value largely comes from the fact that they're secret-ish. In effect, they're passwords.
- d110af5ccf 4y agoThere's also nothing stopping the service from remembering this hypothetical SSN equivalent (or a fingerprint of it), exchanging data with other service providers, and tracking you that way. There are certainly cryptographic primitives that can be used to solve the privacy concerns but I have approximately zero confidence that they would even be considered for use by the current technically illiterate batch of legislators.
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoMaybe, if we're being idealistic, it needn't be particularly powerful. We could just say that every authority would get their own permutation of the ID, a hash of the real ID and the authority's ID or some such, just to make it fairly difficult for two companies to see if their respective IDs are identical. Not perfect, but simple and makes it harder to exploit.