Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> Maybe there, but not here...not everyone in the US has one.  Many people 
> who live in the US don't, even though they're legal.

  I can't understand how that can work. The most prominent problem which
comes to mind is: How do they collect taxes if they don't know who is who?
How can employers inform the government who is working for them if the
employees have no ID? (At least here employers have a rather strict duty
to have very accurate paperwork on who is working and every single cent
is accounted for and notified, mostly for taxing and insurance purposes
but also for other things, such as ensuring employee rights and such.)

> > as it's an unambiguous unique identifier (and the government has your
> > data associated with it).

> Over here we tend to be suspicious (some would say "overly suspicious") 
> of the idea of a national identity database.  Governments around the 
> world have demonstrated that they're not terribly good at keeping data 
> that should secure secured.  Though the most recent examples I can think 
> of are from he UK....

  One can be suspicious of a government that wants to keep accurate
information on every single citizen of the country, but I really can't
understand how a country can work without that. The Finnish government
(and I'm sure it's the same for many other countries) knows the exact
number of Finnish citizens, and their basic info (date of birth, etc.)

  That might sound a bit draconian when said like that, but I have yet
to feel that being abused. It seems to work quite well. One situation
where the government knowing who you are works pretty well is in, as
the name implies, social security. For example if you break a leg, you
just go to the hospital, tell your social security number, and they fix
you up for free. No hassle.

  To somewhat compensate, Finland has very strict privacy laws (probably
much stricter than in most other countries). For example, it's strictly
prohibited to publish lists of information about people, such as for
example people's names and their SSNs. This goes sometimes to rather
extremes: For example, at schools it's prohibited to put lists of
student names and their student numbers in public view (eg. in test
scores) because it's interpreted to break the privacy laws. (You can
publish lists which have only the numbers or only the names along with
the test scores, but not both. Most choose to publish only the numbers
because they feel more anonymous.)

  Another extreme example (and perhaps even a bit ridiculous) was a
Finnish website which collected photos of cars with funny license plates.
The website was shut down by authorities because it was interpreted to
break privacy laws (it connected license numbers with the technical
info of the cars, in the form of photographs).

  Naturally phonebooks are an exception to this. But even with them you
always specifically choose whether you want your number on the public
phone book or not when you create a phone contract. (And later you can
change this with one phone call.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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