Re:White House wants to end Social Security numbers as a nat...
by klipt on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @06:58PM
(#15396932)
Passport number? A US passport card doesn't cost much, and non-citizen residents generally already have a foreign passport.
Re:White House wants to end Social Security numbers as a nat...
by freehunter on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @07:04PM
(#15396969)
>A US passport card doesn't cost much
That's the problem. It doesn't cost much, but a Social Security number costs nothing and takes nothing to get. Something is infinitely more than nothing. Passports also require a lot of paperwork and identification to get that people may not have.
Re:White House wants to end Social Security numbers as a nat...
by jsmthrowaway on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @07:06PM
(#15396980)
And passports are cancelled and taken after a felony conviction. Not many know this.
You’d be asking businesses to get set up with every single state and territory for the purposes of identity management, and giving fraudulent folks fifty-four opportunities to defraud national businesses rather than N social security numbers. I can do the OMB analysis on your bill: 54x growth in consulting fees, billions in lost productivity forcing every system to switch to a new fifty-four jurisdiction unique identifier, etc. etc.
Ideal would be a number that fits in the same space as an SSN but can be rotated. This limits significant changes to national company systems, but means you only have a billion not-so-secure numbers to play with, so you’d have to strongly disincentivize rotations to about 2 or 3 per lifetime modulo American death rate. If we are going to disrupt extensively, let’s focus on one American system rather than fifty-four systems for no net benefit; if state-level identification was useful for this purpose, we would already be using the ones we have. We don’t.