Germany has had a constitutional restriction in place explicitly prohibiting an SSN equivalent.
These days, the tax ID can supposedly be used for that purpose, but I haven’t seen much use of that yet.
Very interesting! Thank you for this
FWIW, I think in this age of massive databases that can be effortlessly joined on fuzzy matching criteria, the lack of a unique person identifier is more of a hurdle for legitimate use cases than a safety measure against government or corporate overreach.
One good thing about it is the complete lack of the horrible "SSN as both primary key and bearer authentication token" pattern that's commonplace in the US, though – but the alternatives are pretty annoying, in my experience.
TIL. My last and current number had the first 4 characters the same, so I didn’t even realize that (and the times before I never thought of it).