4 ms·
Not even the date of birth is necessarily stable. The exact date is of course, but in some cases it was registered wrongly; this happens sometimes with immigrat
by Freak_NL 3y ago
Not even the date of birth is necessarily stable. The exact date is of course, but in some cases it was registered wrongly; this happens sometimes with immigration.
National identification numbers should be opaque; just a number unique in its own domain, but encoding nothing¹.
1: An exception is to have a certain ranges of those numbers designated for testing, so you can test stuff without ever accidentally using a real one.
- vidarh 3y agoIt doesn't really matter if it's stable if the value used in the national id number is just seeded with the best option at the time it is assigned, though, and in that case it can still be convenient to use a value that for most people will be easy to remember. E.g. it's easier for me to remember the 5 digits on top of my birth date than to remember the full 11 digits of my Norwegian id number. That a small proportion of people have leading 6 digits that aren't a perfect match for their birth dates may be a minor nuisance for them but no more *as long as people don't assume the leading digits can be relied on.
- miki123211 3y agoThere should be at least a checksum (which we also do have, even though many systems sadly don't check it).