> That's still printed on them.

Q21: When did Social Security cards bear the legend "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION"?

A: The first Social Security cards were issued starting in 1936, they did not have this legend. Beginning with the sixth design version of the card, issued starting in 1946, SSA added a legend to the bottom of the card reading "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES -- NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION." This legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972. The legend has not been on any new cards issued since 1972.

https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html

> This seems like wishful thinking to me.

The correct answer is correct regardless of who wants it to be.

While you are correct, reality nearly always differs.

"technically correct" - the best (and worst) kind of correct.

I'm not sure I get the relevance, but I don't see it as self-evident that simply by banning the use of SSNs you will end up with a coherent national identification system (and if you do I'm not sure why that'd be preferable to one run by the government).

We don't need a coherent national identification system. We don't have a global one, the EU doesn't have one, why does the US need one?

Centralized identification is bad. There exists no competent, accountable, trustworthy party to administer it. It inherently gets abused to aggregate information about people that should be private. Monolithic systems are slow to adapt, allowing attackers to continuously outflank them.

When a bank needs to identify you, let them use your bank account number. When a doctor needs to identify you, let them use your patient ID number. And never the two shall meet.

What happens in that case is they all do it anyway, except in a haphazard and careless way where you might get mixed up with someone else.

Besides that, sometimes multiple entities do need to know who you are; how is it supposed to work if your insurer and your healthcare providers don't aren't able to match you up to one person?

> What happens in that case is they all do it anyway, except in a haphazard and careless way where you might get mixed up with someone else.

It is possible to make things sufficiently mixed up that the entire consent-absent aggregation system falls apart. Prohibiting them from using social security numbers and otherwise not providing any alternative unique primary key would go a long way toward that end.

> Besides that, sometimes multiple entities do need to know who you are; how is it supposed to work if your insurer and your healthcare providers don't aren't able to match you up to one person?

You don't need a single global identifier for that. You can give your healthcare provider your insurance policy number.

> It is possible to make things sufficiently mixed up that the entire consent-absent aggregation system falls apart. Prohibiting them from using social security numbers and otherwise not providing any alternative unique primary key would go a long way toward that end.

Not really. Log onto Spokeo, look yourself up, and see how many errors there are -- but at the same time, how the data is "close enough" to be useful. All compiled without a single identifier like SSNs.

Ah the equally frustrating corollary to "works on my machine"