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. 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. A further complication is that the same individual could have been issued two or _more_ different numbers, either by design, or accident.
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.
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. xan jonathon grafolog@netcom.com Monolingualism is a curable disease