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A comment on Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social Security database [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social ... by nemomarx on Thursday February 05, 2026 @07:40AM (#46899003)
The thing about social security is that it was supposed to be used for a fairly narrow system, and the physical cards even have text like "not to be used as identification" on them. And then we used it for that anyway
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Re:Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social ... by namibj on Thursday February 05, 2026 @07:54AM (#46899105)
The German equivalent to the SSN in it's ubiquity, the "federal tax id", is illegal to use for non-tax purposes.

As a German that feels about correct.

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Re:Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social ... by salawat on Thursday February 05, 2026 @09:35AM (#46900075)
SSN is technically the same. The Social Security Act, actually has that point explicitly called out. Did anyone listen? Nope.
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Re:Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social ... by namibj on Thursday February 05, 2026 @02:40PM (#46904046)
Do they have penalties in the 5+ digits for each such offense?
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Re:Data breach: DOGE 'accidentally' leaked the whole Social ... by salawat on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:46PM (#46927033)
Wouldn't matter. No one is interested in enforcing it, and there is too much value in the datapoint to credit rating agencies to tear the entire edifice down. Hell, back in 2011, I was part of a group migrating away from SSN usage at the Federal level. The biggest delay? Waiting for another semantically compatible I'd to manifest. TIN (taxpayer identification number) could be synthetically combined with a couple other ID's in the dataset such that they could finally retire the SSN's we weren't supposed to be using in the first place.
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