[nemomarx]

The thing about social security is that it was supposed to be used for a fairly narrow system, and the physical cards even have text like "not to be used as identification" on them. And then we used it for that anyway

[namibj]

The German equivalent to the SSN in it's ubiquity, the "federal tax id", is illegal to use for non-tax purposes.

As a German that feels about correct.

[salawat]

SSN is technically the same. The Social Security Act, actually has that point explicitly called out. Did anyone listen? Nope.

[namibj]

Do they have penalties in the 5+ digits for each such offense?

[salawat]

Wouldn't matter. No one is interested in enforcing it, and there is too much value in the datapoint to credit rating agencies to tear the entire edifice down. Hell, back in 2011, I was part of a group migrating away from SSN usage at the Federal level. The biggest delay? Waiting for another semantically compatible I'd to manifest. TIN (taxpayer identification number) could be synthetically combined with a couple other ID's in the dataset such that they could finally retire the SSN's we weren't supposed to be using in the first place.