For non-Americans (and Americans) that don't quite understand what SSN is and why it's a problem, CGP Grey [1] has a great (and short) video about the history and why it's not technically an identifier, but has become one.
In the 80s, the very popular Aussie prime minister, Bob Hawke wanted to introduce a National ID card, complete with a unique number, that would then be used for everything from Medicare to tax filing. The government however did not have the numbers to pass it through the Senate. Hawke called a double dissolution (dissolving both lower and upper houses of parliament) over the issue. He was returned to power after the election but still without a majority to get the bill through.
There were then attempts to use "other" government issued ID cards like the Medicare number, for this purpose. To prevent this, a few years later, a bill was passed that would prevent any such use.
In reality, this means businesses can ask for government issued numbers but it has to be optional and voluntary, and never used as a primary ID. When I go to my doctor for example, I can provide them with my medicare number, in which case they will claim the Medicare rebate on my behalf automatically, or I can refuse to provide them this number, pay the doctor's fee in full, and claim the rebate from medicare myself separately. Similarly I can provide my bank with my tax file number, in which case they will automatically tax my interests earned according to my income band. Or I can not provide them my tax file number, in which case they'll tax my interest rate at the highest income band, and I can then get the money back from the tax office when I file my tax returns at the end of the year.
In Australia we don't have a Bill of Rights. We don't even have a right to freedom of speech. The police can ask us to unlock our phones without a warrant; etc etc. Yet when it comes to privacy, our laws are very clear. For a country with such a history of protecting individual liberties, it always amazes me that the United States takes such a laissez faire approach to privacy.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-13/trust-exchange-digita...
Feel like it’s kinda like my bank using my email as the password or something.
The first step is to call it what it is: fraud by misrepresentation. The owner wasn't deprived access to their identity (a key component of theft), they weren't even involved in the transaction. Companies want to have their cake and eat it - have low barriers to making sales/offering loans without rigorously verifying the identity of the person benefiting and be shielded from losses when their low-friction on-boarding fails lets in fraudsters.
If a home buyer is duped into transferring deposit into a fraudsters account, they don't blame it on corporate "identity theft" and put the escrow agent on the hook by default.
e.g. You get hauled into court for a lawsuit demanding the loan repayment, for a loan someone else used your name to get?
- It wasn’t me.
Isn't that the opposite of innocent until proven guilty?
The problem with putting a value judgement on this is that it will precondition people to assume good faith or bad faith on the validity of the assessment based on how they interpret the fairness of the court system.
Instead, we could just say that the majority of the cases are people trying to get out of legitimate debts. If we wanted to go farther, we could say that's because some people just don't feel responsible for their own debts and some people make a choice that a last ditch effort to get out of a debt they know they should pay rather is the lesser of two evils when the alternative is to continue to fail to provide adequately for their family given their circumstances, and how different people may draw that line at different points.
That's harder to articulate and a larger discussion that may be a tangent people aren't interested in discussing though, so it's probably just simpler to keep the value judgements out of it if the intent is to keep the discussion productive.
There's another discussion which could be had about just how legitimate even "legitimate debts" actually are in some cases but that's even more in the woods.
Are we saying that if you can show you have enough income / assets, it'll be that much more likely that you'll be fine in those cases?
If they knew it wasn't you, they wouldn't have written the loan in the first place. They're asking you to repay it because they really do think it was you.
If "it wasn't me" was all anyone had to do to get out of paying a loan, many people would do it.
For example, when you purchase online, some merchants do not check who is the owner of the card, or the address. It's done on purpose, because some people borrow the card of the others, some people don't want to use their card, etc. And overall it's all about risk management, but if the holder is really the one in front of you is just one factor among others.
Even if online payments were eliminated, and you had to show up in person with a birth certificate and passport to perform a transaction, fraud would be non-zero.
To have a functioning business, people need to be able to use the system.
But in this scenario, there is basically zero evidence it was you
That's why SSNs are still such a big deal. Why fix the problem when you can just make it someone else's problem?