-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <Pine.SUN.3.95.970602014607.25651C-100000@netcom2>, on 06/02/97 at 02:24 AM, jonathon <grafolog@netcom.com> said:
On Sun, 1 Jun 1997, Tim May wrote:
At 5:25 PM -0700 6/1/97, William H. Geiger III wrote:
stored on individules a SS number is quite convienat as everyone has a unique one. Most employee, payroll, medical, insurance, credit, databases
Somebody here is forgetting that the Social Security Adminstration, back in the mid-eighties claimed that at least 10 percent of the numbers in use, were improperly issued.
<sigh> This is really no suprise considering who is issueing the numbers. :=/
The same number was issued to _two or *more*_ people. The worst case was a number that several thousand people used, thinking it was issued to them, exclusively, when it was in fact never issued.
This is rarely a problem from a data managemant posistion as SS # are key fields. Any attempts at adding duplicates produces errors which then have to be resolved usally manually by human intervention. Rarely are SS #'s used exclusivly but in combination with other data (name & DOB is usaully suffecient).
A further complication is that the same individual could have been issued two or _more_ different numbers, either by design, or accident.
I doubt that 2 or more SS# would be issued delibratly. The only reason for multiple SS#'s would either be screw-ups by SSA or by design of the person applying for the SS#. I imagine that new SS# may be issued in some special cases such as witeness relocation, perhaps after adoption, but then the old SS# is not being used so it is not really an issue.
unique qualities that make it perfect for this use: 1 every person has a unique #, and 2 it never changes. This can not be said for any other
Both premises are false, and the SSA has said so on several different occasions.
For all practical purposes it is. with the exception of screw-ups by SSA ones SS # is unique and with the exception of a few rare cases mentioned above it never changes. compare this to other identifiers and it is obviously the most convienient id # available. Atleast 50% of the population has 1 name change durring the cource of their lifes, Addresses change numerious times during an average americans lifetime, and DOB's are not unique enough to be used. While problems do exsist with using SS#'s as id they are quite small when compaired to using other less stable data to generate id #'s.
without entry of any allegedly random numbers, and without any hashing of personal data. It's not necessarily a real short number, certainly not as short as an SS number.
One proposal I'm familiar with was: date of birth << year month day >> time of birth << hours, minutes, seconds >> longitude of birth << degrees, minutes, seconds >> lattitude of birth << degrees, minutes, seconds >> sex << one letter >> mother's initials << first, middle, last >> father's initials << first, middle, last >>
so you'd end up with something like
19970601185500-0300000.00-300000.00mxyzwvz
<< A number which would be issued to a male born today somewhere slightly north of Port Shepstone, and slightly west of Pietermaritzburg, RSA. >>
However, there are several problems with it, the two most notable being the lack of accurate birth times, and that most people have a very hard time remembering 42 digit numbers.
I don't know how solvable those, and other not so apparant problems are, but I suspect that it has been intensively studied by more than a few governments and organizations, since it was first proposed, fifty something years ago.
Really much to complex to be of use not to mention the lack of reliable data to form the id #. The use of DOB + Geographic Identifier + Unique Code would work quite well. 19970601 - DOB. 0123 - Sample Geographic Identifier (say NY City). 0142 - Unique Code added to handle collisions of the above two. I beleive that this is very simmilar to what the SSA uses though I beleive that they only encode the year of birth when calculating SS #'s. Using Hex rather than decimal for encoding would help greatly in redicing the number of digits required. I would imagine that the SSA will have to go to a Hex or complete Alphanumeric codings system as the population increases. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBM5JDZ49Co1n+aLhhAQGe8gQAkZk6fySrIz3XF2mui2xzPmquJguy01VG ex8LgvdUqlxsf1on1ap9pt5c9T/k6n1+Ovj8+Hj6C/cVkJo+ql33ZzMxxaZq7lLz N/CO1lcT+JkWtAjLfCsqxflBFin2CuUN3tnAWj/9BHVqhRTLXJ/v1gr2/zwdHtRc mwoGmtaKHUA= =RXle -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----