[yreg]

Oh, we know what it is and we also know that it is terrible for identification.

Just hand out IDs with an actual unique id number with a check digit to _all_ citizens.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A mix of six upper and lower case gets you nearly 20 billion unique IDs, which should be enough for a while.

If we colonise the galaxy we could increase that to seven letters.

[cinntaile]

A social security number is unique. I do agree it's better to use a different unique number.

[spacechild1]

At least in my country, the SSN is unique and everyone has one.

[walletdrainer]

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.

[rvnx]

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

[walletdrainer]

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.