Why, we got something similar in other countries. Here in NL it is called BSN; Burger Service Number (burger means civilian).
I believe the civilian should be able to create identities based on their private key (which only the government knows) and these should have different details. Like for example, a nickname, a realname, a telephone number, and address, or multiple of these. But then, also the civilian should be able to revoke the licenses. Or, rather: they should be valid for a short amount of time.
Nice try, so you tell me that the burger hospital I passed by is not in fact a place where they patch up burgers until they’re back on their feet?
A lot of countries have a unique ID for their citizens which is used for routine identification. On websites, at the bank, etc. nothing special about SSNs in this regard, except that they were leaked more times than you can count.
> Plenty of countries make their numbers de jure public information.
That's the difference. A lot of people and processes in the US make the assumption that the SSN is a well kept secret despite them being publicly leaked so many times. This assumption is a weakness for any process that relies on "secret" SSNs.
Sorry to ruin your fun but in German it's actually just Bürger (capitalized because all nouns are). Though the true etymology might be entirely different.
Bourgeoisie or Burgher in English, Bourgeois in French or in German Bürger, all from old Frankish burg, for town. English has both words, but they now have different meanings, and the term Burgher is mostly obsolete.
The divide (or perception of a divide) between city dwellers and the country is not something the US invented, these divisions predate the colonisation of America.
How is it terrible? SSNs rather reliably identify individual people, actual non-fraudulent collisions are very rare.
The fraud is a separate issue and SSNs are obviously misused, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a reasonable system to uniquely identify multiple people with the same name and DOB.
The fact it is tied to social security and is not called “national ID” shows already it is a legacy system, + the fact there is no authentication in place
Authentication is completely separate from identification, you shouldn’t be using any kind of ID number to authenticate anyone. That does not suggest that ID numbers are not good for identification.