[lxgr]

So your actual objection to SSN-like numbers isn’t that they’re bad for privacy but rather that they’re a poor bearer token authentication mechanism? I think nobody was ever arguing that.

And Germans arguably aren’t “forgetting their history”, they are just regulating to achieve desired outcomes (no government and corporate privacy invasion; strong authentication where necessary), not mechanisms (no unique identifiers).

Times and technology change, so why uphold an old (interpretation of) law that is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the desired outcome in the present day?