Security Basics: Re: Weakness in Social Security Numbers Is Found

[ron () bbb com]

Lorna, Kurt hit the nail on the head. Use of SSN was a misapplication.  

> From a "historical" perspective, use of SSN as a unique identifier was started long ago.  Long before the internet, 
> long before trivially cheap computer processing became available, before that cheap computer power allowed "data 
> mining" huge data sets from many disparate sources, in many cases use of SSN started before computing and most 
> certainly that misuse of SSN started long before privacy legislation forbade it. 
The SSN has 2 functional features that made it ideal in early days of computing.  First it provided a unique "key" to 
customer data, no need to create and store another one (important when CPU Cycles and data storage were very 
expensive).  Second, the customer could present their SSN card as identification. 

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