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Here in Italy we are given a Codice Fiscale at birth, which is a string of 13 characters derived by 3 letters of the last name, 3 letters of the first name (usually these 6 letters are all consonants, but there are exceptions for names like Anna), 2 digits, a letter and two other digits representing the birth day, one letter and the digits representing the birthplace an one last letter which is a checksum.

These are state-issued so in case of people that share all those characteristics there's a system in place which changes just one character and gives a different result.

Every contract I signed and every interaction with the government required this information, so the kind of mishaps you talk about are not that common here (at least to my knowledge). Also, different from US social security numbers, this is not used as the only credential for important services, so keeping it secret is not needed (also, it can be manually derived in most cases, indeed you know the needed data. The algorithm is public).

One other thing that avoids confusion is that father and son can't legally have the same name.

EDIT: more info on the Italian Fiscal code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code_card

Also in Italy: my mom has several middle names and she has one set on her national ID, another on her driver's license and the codice fiscale was calculated with only the first given name.

She's having so much trouble opening a new bank account that she's probably going to legally change her name (rather than her codice fiscale).

I agree with you that in general this system works pretty well, but we also have our nagging issues.

In general the problem is that most automated systems ask you for all the info necessary to compute your codice fiscale and then double check what you've entered, if you're one of those cases where one letter had to be changed or something like that, most online forms will complain and give no possibility of recourse.

Your are lucky. Here in Denmark we have the CPR-number (det Centrale Person Register - the Central Person Register). Unfortunately this number is all to often used as authentication so is supposed to be kept secret. This is of course terribly broken and they get leaked all the time - also they are stamped onto everybody's national health insurance card[0]...

[0]: It's the "999999-9996" on https://i.imgur.com/GscmMjX.jpg

Where is the sole number used for authentication? We got the same number in Sweden but the number is not secret, you need it combination with something else like an ID, signature, digital signature etc.

In Estonia we have an personal identification code, it is never used as authentication, only for differentiating between people, we have Estonian ID card for authentication and identification.

To be picky, there is no "exception", there is a rule that is as follow:

For the surname get the first three consonants

For the name get the first three consonants.

If there are not enough consonants, use as many consonants there are, then start again from the beginning with vowels. If there are not enough consonants and vowels (two characters name) an X is added.

I.e. Anna is N (first consonant) N (second consonant) A (first vowel) -> NNA.

Ana would be NAA.

With a name like (say) Bo of only two letter, a X is added, i.e. BOX

https://www.paginainizio.com/service/strutturacodicefiscale....

Same in Spain and Sweden when it comes to fiscal Id. Really useful.

But the number is not enough to buy anything or open a bank account. For that you need the physical id card that is as hard as forge as passports.

A very good system to make contracts, paying taxes, school registration, etc easy without allowing false impersonation.

Sweden's personnummer system is much more elegant - your code is your date of birth followed by a 4-digit unique identifier.

Everybody knows their personnummer by heart, while in Italy most people carry their health card around with the 16-character codice fiscale.

Well in Croatia OIB is a random 11 digit number, but still most people I know managed to memorize theirs, especially if you're an entrepreneur running a business and have to fill it all the time.

>Everybody knows their personnummer by heart, while in Italy most people carry their health card around with the 16-character codice fiscale.

Cannot say about Sweden, but most people I know in Italy also know by heart their Codice Fiscale (whether they carry with them nonetheless the card is another thing).

I know mine by heart and I still get mildly surprised reactions every now and then when I give it to an office worker.

How do you use this physical ID card online? Or phrased otherwise, how do you apply for a credit card or similar online?

> How do you use this physical ID card online?

You don't. For that, you can get a digital signature. You can go to a police station, or to an embassy and present your physical Id card to get a digital signature. You can use that signature to sign contracts or your tax returns.

> how do you apply for a credit card or similar online?

In Spain, with your usual bank, you use your login/password and your 2FA.

In Sweden, you can use Bank-Id almost everywhere to identify yourself. It is also a digital signature, but it has brother use.

Interesting, Croatia moved away from personally identifiable information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Master_Citizen_Number) to randomly chosen digits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number....

In France the social security number has that role, in a format described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INSEE_code#National_identifica...

For administrative purposes it makes sense to uniquely identify people, but for privacy purposes it is a feature to not be uniquely identifiable. I don't think one can get around that tradeoff. In South Africa, if you have someone's ID and also their tax number then it is very easy to commit fraud.

Not sure. It also means you get blamed for crimes from your same-nameds.

I hear stories from the USA where repo men try to pin debts on the wrong people, etc.

The rest of the first world mostly has a unique ID for each resident, plus laws that stop abusing it. This seems vastly preferrable.

It's worth mentioning that in case of ambiguity (people with the same name born the same day in the same city) the algorithm solves it by allowing the 7 numbers in the code to be replaced with letters, thus allowing up to 128 variations of the same fiscal code

Again to be picky, not really-really, the algorithm does very little.

If there is not "homocody" the algorithm is "enough".

If there is, then it is allowed to use an algorithm to calculate a different code, BUT this can only be done by the Agenzia delle Entrate that keeps all codes in a database to avoid duplications:

https://quifinanza.it/tasse/codice-fiscale-come-si-calcola-e...

Since the Codice Fiscale comes physically as a credit-card-like piece of plastic, there are no real issues with these "non-regular" codes in person, but - as carlob stated - a lot of online modules (which tend to verify the validity of the supplied Codice Fiscale against the "normal algorithm" applied to the other data supplied in the form, in an attempt to minimize errors/typos) do not usually recognize these "manually" generated by the Agency codes and reject the form.

In a perfect world such forms should warn the user that the Codice Fiscale is not valid (i.e. cannot be recreated by the "normal" algorithm) and provide the possibility to explicitly confirm.

I've also witnessed the opposite problem: a government office roughly equivalent to the DMV (motorizzazione civile) registering a driving license with a codice fiscale provided by person without checking that it was actually issued by the government.

15 yeas later, another person in a different city, miles away, argued loudly, while trying to file the request to convert a foreign driving license, that she 100% sure she didn't already have a driving license in Italy.

(Source: I was waiting in line for my turn and heard every word, increasingly feeling a Kafkaesque grip in my stomach and hoping to never get on the wrong side of Italian burocracy. fwiw, they didn't solve the issue during that session)

>fwiw, they didn't solve the issue during that session

Sure, that's normal, they could not.

It is anyway (even if caused by a different issue) a case of "homocody".

These can only be solved by the Agenzia delle Entrate or - in some cases - they cannot even be solved by them and you need to resort to other means.

And yes, being on the wrong side of bureaucracy is never a good place to be in, the Italian one (but more generally that of any nation with a similar approach, let's call them "Latin", I have personal experience with Spain and Portugal besides Italy, and they are rather similar) is a bit more complex than corresponding anglo-saxonish or germanish ones, but it depends a lot on the specific cases.

The Italian Motorizzazione Civile suffers historically from lack of personnel and the intertwining of "traffic Laws" with "General Law", things - recently - are getting a little better because of simplifications on the legal definition of car as property, but until a few years ago a "simple" change of ownership of a vehicle (what you normally do in the UK by mail and in Germany by going to the nearest Police station) was a terrible experience, usually taking months to obtain the new certification.

In this case the central registry couldn't solve the problem, because it was not their fault.

Both persons had two distinct personal codes, issued officially by the "agenzia delle entrate" office.

It's when the motor vehicle driving license of person A has been registered, that a transcription error happened.

Whether that instance could have been avoided with a more careful check or not misses the point.

The point is that data entry errors are possible.

As this little anecdote exemplifies, having a unique citizens code doesn't prevent the confusion of identities.

It makes it less frequent which in turn makes it a worse experience for those to whom it happens (since officials have no training to solve the issue).

E.g. the software at the "motorizzazione civile" is likely to treat the CF field with a "unique" constraint, which turns out to be a problem when a new user enters the system with a strong proof of legitimate ownership of a code that was likely erroneously used in the past.

Ah, well, then it was not a "homocody" issue, only a "bad transcription" or "human error".

It is not surprising that having a unique citizens code doesn't prevent the confusion of identities when the transcription/inscription is not accurate.

But with all due respect, it is only a truism.

Which however opens the usual dicotomy between frequency of the problems and procedures designed to fix them, it is likely that an extremely rare problem has no "easy fix" exactly because it is rare and maybe it was the first time it happened to the DMV employees involved and there was not an already actually "coded" resolution.

On the other hand, when a problem happens often enough, there will be a ready made, "common" solution to it and even if the high frequency of the problem is actually a sign of an original bad implementation, the public will not perceive it as an issue.

My father (a lawyer) and I shared first and last Names, and a middle initial. Local jury commission kept sending notices for him to attend, with increasing levels of threat. I called and told them "he's dead" and they said "prove it".

So after many failed calls and letters including the death certificate, and now threat of warrant being issued, I had to act. It's not like a cop at the door is going to care that the middle NAMES are different.

I took his cremated remains to their office. Thumped the box down on the counter and said, "You keep demanding he show up, so here he is." I cracked open the box and the woman about lost it and dashed off. Her supervisor showed up and I explained my frustration. They guaranteed it'd be handled. We never saw any notices again.

Fast forward 20 years and a friend is an attorney practicing in a nearby county. A case of someone failing to appear for jury duty comes up (warrant served). Judge says "unless someone brings your dead remains to the office, you're not getting out of jury duty".

My old man would have been absolutely DELIGHTED to have entered local folklore, on both counts.

> Thanks to my ex and I both having first-hand experience with family members having similar names, we both agreed on making sure our children had names that wouldn't cause that type of issue for them.

My aunt was in that same position, tired of her name being confused with other people in the family. So she named her 3 daughters 3 names unique from anyone in the family. Then 3 of her brothers in law married 3 women with those same 3 names.

that's an amazing coincidence

Or it was a well-planned prank/revenge.

Imposition of unambiguous, consistent and generationally persistent naming systems is a state fuction dating to Xia dynasty China (2070 B.C. -1600 B.C.), and were standardised in the Qin dynasty (221 B.C. -206 B.C.) as Xing Shi.

https://21chineseculture.com/origins-of-chinese-surnames/

It's also a major theme of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, though he doesn't trace the practice back that far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

It's an imposition but it's more of a practical imposition needed from anyone living in something bigger than a small village.

People seem to take it as some government bureaucracy when what's really about is not getting confused with the tens or hundreds of other John Smiths living in the same neighbourhood/city as you.

Very true. I've experienced a bit of this first-hand.

Growing up, I, my father, and my paternal grandfather all shared the same first name and last name, and all lived within a couple of miles of each other (my father and I obviously lived in the same residence a big chunk of my childhood, and grandpa lived just a short hop away). Our mail (and gosh knows what else) got mixed up all the time.

To make it even worse, I'm one of those people who chooses to use my middle name, not my first name, as my primary name. So while "legal" correspondence often comes addressed one way, sometimes even that gets mixed up, and phone calls are always weird when I answer "Hi, this is Phil" and the person on the other end goes "Oh, sorry, I was calling for $FIRST_NAME". <click>

And to make this whole story even weirder, my maternal grandfather's middle name (which is what he went by) was the same as the first name shared by me, my dad, and my paternal grand-father. So yeah, we had four family members in a very small area, sharing confusingly similar names.

Naming stuff definitely gets weird.

>and phone calls are always weird when I answer "Hi, this is Phil" and the person on the other end goes "Oh, sorry, I was calling for $FIRST_NAME". <click>

So don't answer the phone that way. There's no reason to volunteer info to a complete stranger you know nothing about anyway. All you have to do is say "Hello?" Then the caller will say "I'm looking for <x>", and then you can handle it however you like.

So don't answer the phone that way.

Sure, I could do that. At this point, the way I answer the phone is more habit than any deeply considered policy. And honestly, more and more, I find that I rarely answer the phone unless I recognize the person calling. Everybody else can leave a voicemail or send email (which is more my preferred way to communicate anyway).

When you're a small business owner, and you have potential customers calling your cell, it's polite and professional to state who you are.

In such cases, isn't it usually better to have a business phone number, and perhaps a trade name as well?

Why not answer with you business name?

now I'm dying to call you and ask for $FIRST_NAME...

I screen out calls from you anyway, @mgkimsal!

This really shouldn't be a problem in the modern age when each person can be assigned a globally (or at least nationally) unique ID number as soon as their birth certificate is produced. It baffles me that the most technologically advanced country in the world still has difficulties figuring out who has the right to vote.

A lot of people in the US just don't like the idea of a central national database that stores information about them. To be sure, this (increasingly) happens at some level anyway. And to a lot of people in, say, Europe this probably seems like a baffling concern. But it's the way it is.

There doesn't even need to be a central database of every citizen. Distributed generation of unique identifiers is a more or less solved problem.

How does the distributed generation of unique identifiers help to keep track of who has voting rights?

State and/or municipal authorities could be tasked with generating identifiers and signing them cryptographically, so that any voting station can verify whether a given identifier is genuine. The federal government doesn't need to keep a central registry of all identifiers, only a list of public keys used by states and municipalities.

Obviously I'm not aware of any country doing things in such a convoluted way. But if Americans really don't want there to be a central registry of everyone's identity, modern computer science and cryptography could help.

You expect that over a hundred years we will manage to keep all private keys used secret?

Yeah, but corporate databases documenting every small detail of their life like who they meet, their location history, chat history with friends and family, etc, all that is fine. Because it's not the government... Never mind that the govt has access through prism and other channels... It really baffles me how voter ID is such a huge issue, but most Americans voluntarily offer up so much of their private info to online social netwoks.

Americans, correct me if I'm wrong but I've researched that left leaning people don't like the idea because minorities can't get documents easily because of distance or money, right leaning don't like federal government have the list and are a bit paranoid about it. Both reasons sound very weird to me.

Be careful with that - my friends enjoy an automatic level of anonymity even if they publish something under their real names, but my real name is rare enough that it points directly to me and me alone on Google results.

The two extremes for the US are probably John Smith and something absolutely unique. Each has their pros and cons.

(Although my name isn't obviously unusual, it's actually more or less Internet unique and, at a minimum, I have a way bigger footprint than anyone else.)

ADDED: Personally it's probably advantageous to me to have a unique online identity. But it means I can't hide behind an excuse that "It must have been one of the other $NAMES that you read about." And I assume such conflicts could get a resume tossed pretty quickly by a recruiter doing a quick search.

The worst alternative is to have a name conflict who might be plausibly you based on location etc. where the other is a criminal, etc. I went to school with someone who shared a name with someone in NYC who was in very public and messy legal problems. He literally got death threats left on his (pre-Web) telephone.

As far as I know my name is globally unique.

Feature of a rare last name (two farmers in two different parts of Norway independently intentionally picked the same misspelling of a more common name to set themselves apart from nearby farms about 200 years ago; only descendants of those two have my last name, and half of them are related to me) coupled with a relatively rare first name.

Annoying when it comes to anonymity, but sometimes it's nice being able to be identified by name alone.

>Annoying when it comes to anonymity, but sometimes it's nice being able to be identified by name alone.

I love having a modern-day superpower: online search anonymity. I have one of the most common firstname/lastname combos in the western world. I don't seen to show up on Google at all, even if you include my middle name. The last time I tried the "search for yourself" experiment I got to about page 200 of Google results that weren't actually me before I gave up. Combine that with my avoidance of social media, and it's like I'm off-the-grid without actually having to be off-the-grid.

My real name is not uncommon. Many years ago, I decided to use it for professional posts on the web in order to build an online presence. There were no significant search results for my name at the time.

Shortly after that, two people (an actor and a prominent academic) with the same name completely overtook me.

I've just embraced it. My real first name (Ambroos) is usually my username and I'm easy to Google with just my first name as a result.

I read through the whole article. It feels like a Kafka novel, and it's the kind of thing that makes me fear any institution with unchecked, unaccountable power over other people. Even if issues are discovered, there's no way to really solve them in the context of the bureaucracy and if you happen to be affected, you're just simply screwed. People either don't care or have some interest in the system being as dysfunctional as it is (see any number of US citizens being held indefinitely as "illegal immigrants").