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Elon Musk may have your Social Security number
(nymag.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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So does everyone, thanks Equifax
It's weird that SSNs are treated as some sort of secret number given they don't have any security features. They were never supposed to be used the way they're used today, but there's no good alternative yet.
The US really needs a replacement, for example a national digital ID based on PKI (public key infrastructure) where you can generate new ID numbers based on a private key. Each bank, lender, employer, etc that needs it would get a unique ID that only works for them, and you could revoke access for just that one company if needed.
Kinda like how OAuth/OIDC login works, where you can log in to sites using your Google account, Apple account, self-hosted Authentik or Authelia, etc. but the site you're logging in to never sees your password. If a site/app misbehaves, you revoke their access to the account, and everything else that uses the account can keep working.
I agree in principle, but try explaining that to your grandmother.
Here's your ID. You can decide who gets to have it.
Easy. The average person isn't going to care about the nerdy shit behind it, any more than they care how Facebook works behind the scenes.
They've been pushing against a national ID for decades so good luck convincing grandma it's not the mark of the beast or something.
But the USA is already using a (very poor) national ID - the SSN.
"why can't you just use my SSN like that nice genius billionaire Elon Musk"
"press this button on the app" is what that would boil down to.
Yeah, I tried to help my grandma with installing/using a video conference app... at the end of the day, I just call her (and yes, she still has a landline) :).
There is already an open standard growing around exactly this concept, Web5 Distributed IDs (DID): https://dev.to/tbdevs/what-is-web5-233o
Disclosure: I worked on the implementation for an Open Banking company (does that need to be disclosed? I'm including it lest someone think I'm a shill)
Huh, TIL. Very interesting, thanks for the link!
And also the same thing but for payments, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, etc.
We're all giving away so much personal information every time we make a transaction, and we've all seen what these fuckers do with it.
Yup. My credit has been frozen since that hack.