[wtmt]

Your claim is blatantly false. Exhibit A: The United States of America. Exhibit B: United Kingdom

And so on.

Please do not get confused with social security numbers (or equivalents) as universal or national identifiers. They are not, although their use in such a manner has caused issues (as pointed out in my comments here).

[bjelkeman-again]

To me it is interesting that proving you identity in the UK could for many years be done with an electricity bill with your name on it and an address, or you driving license, which was a piece of paper which wasn’t hard to forge (no photograph). Cheques where stolen by the postman and used to claim cash at the bank. Nobody could tell me against what identity, as the signature on the cheques wasn’t even close to mine. It was essentially a mess. It is improved now.

Coming from a country, Sweden, with no mandatory ID card and a national identity number, it was both quaint and a real hassle to deal with the odd notion that a national ID number in the UK was a threat to me, but in Sweden it wasn’t. I had more trouble because of it in the UK than I ever had in Sweden. And in the UK you often had to use a passport to identify yourself, which in practice is a national ID.

[robin_reala]

The UK government isn’t allowed to issue mandatory ID cards after the Identity Documents Act 2010: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/40/crossheading/re...

No ID cards are to be issued by the Secretary of State at any time on or after the day on which this Act is passed.

The UK equivalent of a SSN is a National Insurance number, but it’s totally possible to be a citizen without one (e.g. naturalised non-working spouse). NI numbers also aren‘t guaranteed to be unique (if a person is assigned a temporary NI number it’ll be non-unique with other people with the same birth date).

[psergeant]

> The UK government isn’t allowed to

This is reasonably misleading, as nothing at all stops a new government with a parliamentary majority from simply scrapping that law.

[robin_reala]

That applies to absolutely anything a government could decide to want to do though. If you want to be picky then yes, the UK government currently isn’t allowed to issue ID cards.

[psergeant]

> That applies to absolutely anything a government could decide to want to do though

Mmm, that’s not true. Courts recognise EU supremacy over the British parliament, although it would be possible to ant-fuck this point if you were feeling truly pedantic.

[r00fus]

SSN is a superkey. Just because the USG doesn't permit one to use SSN as a key in your system (see HIPAA) doesn't mean it doesn't act like one for the purposes of exploitation or data aggregation.

[walshemj]

When I worked for BT in the UK misusing NI numbers as ID was a gross disciplinary offence.