See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i
According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what's going on.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I'm sure folks on here know this, but you know, there's also that 10K a day that don't so...
What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a "natural" key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it'd make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.
SSN is not unique to a person. ~~They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one).~~ Edit: (See responses) It seems I'm misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.
And they're protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don't really want to store them at all (unless you're the SSA, who would have guessed that'd ever come up though!?)
It's so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren't dying.
Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
"Several generations" well that is fucking garbage
Nah. It’s worked for 50 years and if we get another 30 then it’s done its job well. Government is supposed to review and adjust things as time goes on and Social Security Numbers weren’t intended to uniquely identify citizens. They probably expected an overhaul to be done by 2020.
They fact that we haven’t reworked portions of it and rely on SSNs to identify citizens shows that we haven’t had a forward-thinking Congress in the last 20 years at minimum.
The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.
Less secure than a gift card
Well, it's an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key
You can guess a phone number as well by changing the last number, but that information has 0 value unless it is coupled with other informations.
I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not, but DOB and location where you were born are additional informations as I mentioned in my replie before.
well tbf, the standard coming from computing is doubling the bits until it stops being a problem, or with ipv6 practically having more IPs than there are atoms in the entire planet of earth (i think i did the calculation a while ago, and it was like, most of the atoms in earth, so like, not quite, but for all intents and purposes, might as well be)
According to XKCD about 40% of the earth
https://xkcd.com/865/
yeah that sounds about right, someone should make an XKCD search engine i think.
So they’ve issued almost half the possible numbers, current US population is actively using 1/3rd of them. I think unless there is a major drop in birth rates “several generations” is two. Either my great grandkids will be reusing dead people SSNs or there will be 10 digit numbers which is going to be a problem for any systems that coded it as char(9).
Ongoing trends would indicate a significant drop in birth rate is extremely likely. Major cities will most likely be facing population shrinkage by the end of the century
It doesn't. There is no truely unique ID in the US.
Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.
It's wild too. I've been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn't accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father's name.)
Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we're doing!
You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.
You don't want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.
This has happened many times. In the last city I lived in, a man went in to have a leg amputated and they got the wrong one, so he ended up with zero legs.
This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren't trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.
It's hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.
And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)
Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it's compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.
I'm being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.
https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/
https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/blog/eid-and-the-eu-digital-identity-frameworka-scandinavian-perspective/
This is the first I've heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.
The SSN is supposed to just be a number that you give your employers and the IRS so that your social security (the USs blanket retirement savings/pension system) contributions get logged correctly to you and then when you retire you can use that number to get the social security benefits that you paid into. The number has ended up being used for all sorts of things because the USA is slightly broken because it is SORT OF a unique ID number for each US citizen, except of course that it wasn't intended to be that, SSNs are only supposed to be used from first social security contribution (first paycheck) to last social security payout (death) so naturally they can just be recycled.
He's complaining that a number isn't unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn't supposed to be unique and he's complaining that it's not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.
But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they're supposed to be used.
But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just... so many of them.
This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.
The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA's gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.
That's why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don't need a lot of info to financially ruin someone's life.
When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually. This is what makes it not unique. If something were to screw up in the process the new person could have debt from the prior person for example even though it is not their debt. Another concept common is using the last 4. There are so many conflicts when using just last 4 in a database its bad design.
This is not true, but often repeated. From SSA
https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus explains it pretty well
Came here looking for Grey, was not disappointed.
It's supposed to be unique and might actually be now, but there are def duplicate ssns out there. Craziest identity situation I was told by a project manager of government system that is all about identities. Same First, Same last,same Date of Birth, same SSN; different people.
Weird story, and I have to assume this is data entry error, identity theft, or something else: I couldn't sign up for a hospital billing platform because my name and full birthdate (including year) conflicted with someone else in the system. I called the hospital billing department and they were very confused about the whole situation. It didn't really get resolved, and I basically had to let it go to collections so that I could pay because of the shitty system. I don't have a very common name, and never have had this problem before.
I don't know all the ways but my identity was stolen and I never knew until my attorney was looking at something else for me in conjunction with the social security commission where I lived, and it popped up under a different name. They then accessed my records using other information, and it was the same number. It took a long time to get it sorted. A few years.
It's happened twice to me, I'm now 41. I was able to get it resolved both times but it was not easy and in the first case seriously hurt my credit score for seven years.
It's not fun.
I'm hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.
Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren't natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else's data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you'd hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.
SSNs are not reissued after death and never have been. I've been seeing a lot of people comment this, but I'm not sure where they're getting it from. (They're not unique for other reasons, however.)
Just curious, but if SSNs were not recycled after death, would there be any reason not to use them as a primary key?
They're sequential, so the values above and below yours are valid SSNs of people born in the same hospital around the same time.
This would make it trivially easy to get access to records you shouldn't
Isn't that assuming you have access to doing arbitrary SQL queries on the database? Then you'd by definition have access to records you shouldn't.
No. You can have control over specific parameters of an SQL query though. Look up insecure direct object reference vulnerabilities.
Consider a website that uses the following URL to access the customer account page, by retrieving information from the back-end database:
https://insecure-website.com/customer_account?customer_number=132355Here, the customer number is used directly as a record index in queries that are performed on the back-end database. If no other controls are in place, an attacker can simply modify the customer_number value, bypassing access controls to view the records of other customers.As the user posted, one human can have more than one SSN in their lifetime. Many humans will never have an SSN. Some of those humans may have a TIN. Some humans may have at least one TIN and one SSN at some point.
I thought I had lost mine once and got a new SSN card, they don't give you a new number, it's the same number
OP is talking about identity theft, not physically losing your card.