Someone was interviewed on the subject and said that if they built the system today, they would totally go for randomly generated number sequences rather than relying on a system based on birth date etc.
Isn’t that the same as the Social Security/National Insurance number you get in various countries? In France you have a unique number that depends on your sex, where you’re born, 3 more digits to differentiate you from all other people of the same sex that were born the same day at the same place and then a final digit for a checksum.
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...
However, there are a few reasons someone will get a new SSN number. Witness protection for example.
I know someone with misspellings of their name on one bureau's credit report and its never caused a problem (he's too lazy to ask them to fix it). The misspelling is listed as his name and the right spelling is listed as "other name" (or something like that).
SSN and ITIN: nnn-nn-nnnn EIN: nn-nnnnnnn
So it covers not only all the individual taxpayers but also all the employers and businesses that are taxable separately from individual income tax payers.
In Sweden we use https://www.bankid.com/en/ which doesn't use SMS for authentication, it's mobile app based.
What if you have more than 10,000 people who have the same birthday? Let alone people with similar birthplaces/gender/etc. If that's all there is to it it seems like you'd run up against a combinatorical ceiling pretty soon.
Sweden has added two million people in the last half century. In net terms, essentially all of those two million have been immigrants rather than born in Sweden. They're de-populating when you exclude immigration, because their birth rate is so low.
10,000 people per day would be like Sweden adding 1/3 to its population in the next year. That's never going to happen. They're #166 when it comes to birth rate. Based on their population gain rate, they'll need to worry about the four digit limit in about 2,000 to 3,000 years give or take.
Also you have variability, there will be some days that are much more populated than others.
The last digit is just a checksum digit, so we're left with 3 digits per day. But that still would give some leeway for each day. The problem seems to be that some immigrants have been assigned a default birth date (Jan 1 and Jul 1) as their exact birth date is unknown.
Another issue which is not mentioned in the article is that we're only using two digits to encode the year (i.e. YYMMDD-XXXX), which causes problems now that many live to be 100+ years. Most banks and other places now requires you to enter a four digit year, even though that technically is incorrect. The correct way to annotate that someone is over a hundred years old is that the dash changes to a plus sign (i.e. YYMMDD+XXXX), although I've never seen that implemented anywhere.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev...