CGP Grey
14 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2017–2024
7:49 · 14M views · Mar 29, 2017
CGP Grey explains the history of the US Social Security card and number, and why they became a de facto national ID despite never being meant for it. He also covers why America resists a proper identity card.
HN reaches for it in every identity theft and data breach thread as the clearest, most enjoyable short explainer of why SSNs make bad identifiers.
20 comments from Hacker News
For everybody who isn't acquainted with how Social Security Cards work in the US and how they came to be I highly recommend watching "Social Security Cards Explained" by CGP Grey this video He also explains why US citizens don't have an Identity Card as opposed to many European countries.
For anyone who wants an explanation at just how bad the social security number really is, this is the most enjoyable explanation for it I've seen, by CGP Grey this video
The SSN was never intended as a national ID. It was originally created alongside the Social Security Administration, to track what individuals put in and what they take out. People only received one upon becoming employed. Over time, the IRS realized that it could be used as a national ID, and adopted it for that purpose. They encouraged people to obtain one from a young age (even for their newborn children), and it was used to replace the original 'honor system' of 'How many children do you have?' tax discounts; now they'd need to register their child with a SSN. Companies eventually began piggybacking on the number as a national identifier (due to our lack of one), and voila. We're left with an awfully insecure identification system that shouldn't be an identification system for much in the first place. For anyone interested in more: this video , and the sources below the video.
This video does a great job explaining it: this video The summary is that the USA does not have an official national person identity number. The SSN is the closest approximation, so it is being (ab)used as one. This is despite that it is explicitly not designed for it and has some qualities which make it less suitable (the numbers are small and very predictable). In general, nearly every national-identity-system suffers from a contradiction between assigning identities and identifying. Where the number you get assigned is simultaneously your identity and a secret you use to establish your identity. There are initiatives to solve this using cryptography, but this is complicated by political attitudes towards privacy and government tracking. I dare say in the USA this is more pronounced due to both the problem and the political attitude against solutions being more pronounced.
Actually, the SSN is an account number, solely intended for tracking money paid into and paid out of an account. It isn't meant for identification, and the method it's used for identification is terrible. (Largely: If you know the number, you are identified.) It's treated like a secret, but as a 9-digit number you give to dozens of organizations in your life which follows a predictable and partially guessable pattern, it is an absolutely terrible secret. Absolutely good explainer video about how this travesty took place historically: this video