Why everything is tied to our SSN, I don't understand. Why we allow private companies to manage our US social credit score, I don't know either. There are a lot of things we've done here that make no sense.
Also if you look at your Social Security Card, it states "Not to be used for identification". But Companies, Univ and everyone ignored that because they wanted a Unique Number. Not may people realize the SSN is recycled as people die off.
I wish the US Gov would sue all Companies and Orgs that used the SSN for ID purposes for trillions and return that amount to people with Social Security Numbers.
Unfortunately, we have several anyway, but that’s no reason to accept a universal inescapable federal ID that we would never be able to roll back.
> I wish the US Gov would sue all Companies and Orgs that used the SSN for ID purposes for trillions and return that amount to people with Social Security Numbers.
At least on that we agree. The SSN bas become a poor, backdoor replacement for federal identification documents — which is exactly what people were worried would happen, and why they received the sop of “not for identification”. That didn’t last long:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/26/weekinreview/the-nation-n...
The issuer of an universal ID gains gatekeeping power. Besides the danger of people getting excluded, children and marginalized demographics won't have one.
Ironically widespread deployment of an ID can sometimes lead to more fraud. Bureaucracies tend to confuse identification, authentication, and authorization. Possessing a scan of a passport is often accepted as possessing the passport which is accepted as authority to transact with that name. Through the transitive property possessing a hacked .jpg can allow a fraudster to transact as you. When businesses and bureaucracies are not liable for fraud or their errors, they focus on the ID tokens as a way to improve throughput instead of assessing the legitimacy of the transaction in a holistic manner.