Running Low on SSNs?

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The social security element of this discussion reminds me of a great poem entitled "The Unknown Citizen".

ION, I know of people -- in my faith, mind you -- who believe that SSN numbers are the Mark of the Beast and a sign that the Rapture is nigh. I'm extrememly religious and all but stupid is as stupid does.

 

It's not the sign of the Beast until it's on their right hands or foreheads. That'd be the imbedded biometric credit cards.

 

Yeah, but think about the benefit of never misplacing your credit card.

 

1) I had to open this thread to find out what on earth SSN stood for.

2) No, we do not have this problem in NZ, because we have no such identity statistic. I can't think of any logical reason why we would need to assign a number to every person in the country.

 

Is Wikipedia lying?

 

SSNs are immensly practical, I can't see any reason for not giving each citizen one. Here in Sweden our SSN is our date of birth +4 numbers so mine would be 19801004-XXXX where the last four also shows where you were born and your sex.

 

Mesmero's comment notwithstanding, surely there must be some government issued card that proves you are who you say you are. How do you get a driver's license, or get a mortgage, or apply for loans for college, or file taxes, etc? Those are just the things I can think of off the top of my head that I use my SSN for. Obviously, once I reach retirement age, I'll also use my SSN to collect Social Security benefits.

Are they unique? If there was another mother who had a baby boy at the same hospital on the same day you were born, would the numbers be identical, or just extremely similar?

We don't have any such system for assigning SSNs, although the first two digits of your SSN does give a pretty good indication of where you were born. Most people born in the state of Pennsylvania have a SSN that starts with 19. I beleive that pattern is present elsewhere, as both my wife and my son - the only people on either side of our family who were born in the state of Maryland - are also the only two people on either side of the family with SSNs that begin with 20. Although I suppose it could be an amazing coincidence.

 

No, but those numbers are nowhere near as ubiquitous as the American social security number. Even I have an American social security number and I only lived there for 4 months!!

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Yes, a birth certificate. But it doesn't have a number on it. How does a number prove who you are?

 

There are around 9-10 million people in Sweden I do not think we are anywhere close to 10000 births a day and yes Aldeth the "personal number" as we call it would be very similar for two boys born on the same day in the same hospital probably only differ one or two digits. To differentiate sex male get even and female odd.

As far as the state and most companies go I am not a name I am a number and I really do not see any problem with that. Seems all the more practical than trying to figure out which Jim Smith I am dealing with.

 

Because it's linked to all type of databases - most banks and even apartment lease agencies can look up your name and creidt history just from giving them that number - and most people have a driver's license if photo ID is required.

But for that matter, how does a birth certificate prove who you are? Any person with a reasonably common first and last name probably shares the same name with someone else in the nation. But everyone has their own number, so John Smith #1 has a different SSN than John Smith #2, or John Smith #398.

 

IRD number we use solely for taxes (which mainly pops up when you change employers), or when you're applying for Student Loans/Allowances, as they are both handled by the same government body.

The National Health number in that link I have never heard of until now, so if it does exist it must not be very important.

In most cases our name/DoB is more than enough. Even if I am John Smith #365, how many other John Smith's were born on the same date? Or in the same place? The odd time I've had to provide proof of who I am (eg. applying for university), a certified copy of a birth certificate does the job. Did get a bit more tricky when my birth certificate is in Norsk - they weren't too happy to accept that.

We're not a big country - we can be more than just a collection of numbers.

 

Yeah, in the US the odds that someone of the same name may have been born on the same day, even in the same place in some places, is a lot higher than in some other nations. Especially with common names. Like mine. In my highschool, they ended up handling school lunches by name (a horrible system that served no purpose at all), and there were three pages of people with my last name alone! I think there were at least five other people in my school with my first and last name.

 

It kind of pains me to say this, but they really don't give a damn if they have the right person or not. The banks and lenders are not the government, and they neither care about the proper process of doing ethical business, nor the due process of law. They only care about grabbing what they can, from whomever they can. Your SS# was NEVER supposed to be used in this manner.

This probably illustrates to whom you are really beholden in your day-to-day activities; don't believe for a minute that it is YOUR government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40571573/ns/business-us_business/

 

While the odds aren't high, I think if you have a common name, the chance exists that someone somewhere in the country has the same DoB. Just look at this example:

Sure, the US has a much larger population than New Zealand. About 308 million compared to 4.5 million - so the US has about 70 times as many people.

But NOG had five people in his high school that had the same first and last name. Even if NOG had a very large high school that was drawing from a population center of a tens of thousands of people, you would need about 50 of such school districts to equal the population of New Zealand. If there were 5 such people with that same name in that same grade, that would yield about 250 people a year with the exact name - thus giving a very high probability that at least two of them shared the same DOB. So yeah, the populations are vastly different, but NOG probably wouldn't have to travel very far from his home town to meet someone with the exact same name and DOB. And you're suggesting that there's no one in the entire nation of New Zealand that would fit that criteria?

Note: The Virginia Beach/Norfolk area of Virginia is densely populated, but there's no way there's anywhere NEAR 4.5 million people living there - not even at the height of the summer vacationing season.

 

Ther's no substitute for a unique number to identify you. It's impossible for a name and date of birth combination to be reliably unique, but birth certificates are not really general identifiers. They're moreso identifiers of you being a person born in such and such country (and as such are 'official' documents with the government seal and all that), useful to prove citizenship and whatnot, not that you're person x to the exclusion of everybody else.

'Identities,' such as they are, are really a collection of data anyway - your name, SSN, date of birth, places you lived, etc.

 

People complain when I put my number as 8

I'm unique enough that most people mispell my name. I've got a double-barelled surname, three middle names and have more trouble with my NINo than I do spelling my name out. The number of departments who state my number doesn't exist is pointless!

 

There is: A state issued DL. Because not only does it have a number, your date of birth, and also a picture, with an actual description of what you look like.

 

Wouldn't that still be a unique number though? There are no duplicate state driver's license numbers that I'm aware of, at least within the state of issuance.