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Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

> The reason it works is that all inhabitants are given a personal identification number upon birth

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.

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You are probably right, I added that part in because I read somewhere that not all countries maintain lists of personal identities as comprehensive but that might have been a long time ago, in that case my mistake.

For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...

SSN's in the US are not unique, though they are only used by one person at a time.

Are you telling me SSN numbers are actually recycled? I don't believe you.

Not reused, but like any system they have made mistakes.

However, there are a few reasons someone will get a new SSN number. Witness protection for example.

"The Social Security Administration does not reuse Social Security numbers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Exhaust...

Not quite the same thing, but ID Analytics claimed that "6.1 percent of Americans have at least two SSNs associated with their name," and "more than 15 percent of SSNs are associated with two or more people" in commercial records.

That just means the commercial records are screwed up.

Right, that goes along with "20% of credit reports have errors." (which was found in an FTC study). Example errors are misspellings and number transposing and both versions end up in the database. The correct report can be pulled up 99.9999% of the time even if it has errors because usually a bunch of data is used to pull up the report (name, address, birthday, social), not just a single number.

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).

Well good luck when the keyspace is one billion, and the current population is about a third of that.

The keyspace is also shared with the larger "TIN" (Tax ID Number) pool, though the pretty-print format is different:

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.

So ... how can it not be exhausted yet, or at least close enough that it's irresponsible for officials to offer blanket denials regarding reuse of defuncts?

Each SSN is used by one person. One person may have multiple SSN's over their lifetime.

The key bit is that it (sounds like) they use it only for identification, whereas the SSN in the US is treated as a "secret" which can be used for authentication (!?). Thus a weird legal limbo where it's officially not supposed to be shared around, as it can prove who you are... yet all kinds of businesses are required to record it to identify their employees :|

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