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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't a US employer have their employees social security number, which would fulfill exactly this role if people cared to look at it?

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I'm not that knowledgeable but I thought SSN aren't public information and that they are not used throughout information systems to identify people because they are 'sensitive information'

They aren't public, but so many places use it as an identifier. It's kind of dumb for something so sensitive.

Social security numbers are not unique, but combine them with a birthday and name, and it gets pretty close.

Social Security numbers are unique. They don't work as a great identifier because they can be mistyped, can be hard to verify, and people don't want to give them out too much.

SSNs should be unique, the only exceptions are fraud or errors.

According to the Social Security Administration:

> At its inception, the SSN's only purpose was to uniquely identify U.S. workers, enabling employers to submit accurate reports of covered earnings for use in administering benefits under the new Social Security program. That is still the primary purpose for the SSN.

They are not. SSNs can and have been reused

There have been cases where the same SSN was issued multiple times on accident, but they haven't been reused on purpose.

Isn't an SSN only 9 digits? Seems inevitable that you'll hit reuse (not now, but probably before the end or even middle of the century)

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