Yes, but in that typically bonkers American way you also have to keep it secret (so nobody can steal your identity), while at the same time revealing it to every Tom, Dick and Harry every time you have to prove your identity.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I don’t get it. Is a social secuirty thingy the same as what National ID’s are for in other countries?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 week ago
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 week ago
If you know their name and their location I believe you can make a very well educated guess at their social security number too
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I assume most people’s social security numbers are out on the dark web nowadays.
Salt typhoon leak a few months ago released 60 million of them iirc.
maniclucky@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes, sort of, but in a stupid way. The number is treated as a unique identifier of a person, but you don’t carry it around since it’s so insecure.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Why not just use the passport number? Or does your passport have the SS number?
maniclucky@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not everyone has a passport and you use SSN to get one. Passports are relatively rare for a lot of people in the US.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Interesting. In europe it’s made simpler because we have the same number on our ID and our Passport. And in many european countries that is what’s used for identification from the government.
CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not everyone has a passport.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yesn’t.
In a nutshell, Social Security is a government run pension/retirement savings system. With a few exceptions you can look up on your own if you’re curious, every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income. Each person in the system, so basically everyone working a job in the US, gets an account number, their Social Security Number.
For awhile after the system started, you’d get your SSN when you got your first job. At some point, they introduced a tax credit for parents with children, if you had a child you could deduct them on your taxes. People started claiming they had more kids than they did to pay less taxes. Sure, let’s just tell the government we have 12 kids, they won’t know we only have 5. The solution to this problem was to require the children being claimed had social security numbers. This had two effects: 1. it got rid of those “paper children,” and 2. Signing up for social security and getting a social security number is part of being born; every American now has a serial number, issued on a card.
The kind of people who are ruining our nation right now are opposed to a national ID system because they hate being part of a functioning society. So we don’t have a national ID card the way many nations do. State governments issue a number of IDs of various types, the de facto standard for identification in the US is a driver’s license. The vast majority of Americans have one. But, not all. The only unique number common to (practically) ALL Americans is a Social Security Number.
Numbers like credit card numbers or sanely designed ID systems have built-in checksums, not every number that fits the regex for a Visa card number is a valid Visa card number. A social security number doesn’t have that; it wasn’t intended as an ID number, it’s an account number, you can tell when and where it was issued by looking at it because it’s a serial number. And because most Americans younger than the president were issued their numbers at birth, you can guess a lot of their number based on where and when they were born. The last four digits are a simple serial number…and often used by banks and such as a second factor. “Okay, just tell me your date of birth and the last four of your social.” the bank teller will ask you out loud.
It’s something we’re gonna have to fix after the war.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 week ago
every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income.
One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.
This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.
Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.
I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Plus those drivers licenses …. Are issued by states and until recently had no real value as a national id. Now we are trying to phase in “Real ID” where those drivers licenses have to meet national standards and be verifiable as a national ID. It hasn’t gone well and keeps getting pushed back, so we’ll see if it really happens this time.
As the forcing function they are requiring Real ID to fly even within the country. Soon you will no longer be able to use a normal drivers license.
But my state screwed up where I paid extra to get a Real ID compliant license but after a mess of lost paperwork they issued a standard license. So I’m not Real ID compliant and they say I can’t get one until my next renewal in a couple years, which means I soon can’t use that as ID to fly. To add to this mess, that means my only alternative is using a passport, even for local flights. And many Americans don’t have passports.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Very explicitly no, but it’s the closest thing so we use it as though it were. It’s supposed to be your identifier for our national pension program and nothing more. But any time we propose a national id for benefits and general ease of use purposes people lose their shit, despite often not being the people protesting the existence of the nsa or the patriot act.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s not supposed to be an identifier, but since it’s the only nationally-assigned designation all citizens get it’s treated like one.
Which is stupid. It’s incredibly insecure, vitally important, leaked to every bad actor on the planet already, and unchangeable when it gets compromised (which it has been).
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 week ago
Sounds fitting for a country run by Trump of all people.
Makhno@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Its been an issue long before he came around