Sweden's entire population is about the size of the Chicagoland area. Now imagine 320+ million people all living in different semi-autonomous states all with their own bureaucracies and hundreds of taxing authorities. Now imagine proposing a national ID card to these people. Yeah, its not that easy. The US isn't centralized like a lot of European nations. Governance of very critical things are done on the state level and that isn't going to change anytime soon.
>I'm guessing its some kind of privacy issue behind there not being a similar system in US?
The social security system, which is a federal program, produced a unique number for all citizens. The states quickly started using this number in their own bureaucracy and everyone else followed (banks, etc). Now its a defacto numeric identifier.
The big problem here is how easy it is to get credit in my name if you have my SSN, like its the root password to my finances. Credit is far too easy to get in the states from a paperwork perspective. I should not fear other people getting my SSN. Banks and other organizations need to realize that if someone presents my SSN, that doesn't mean its me. More numbers or psuedo-SSN's aren't the fix here. The fix is due diligence and better fraud protections.
Not to mention everyone already carries a unique identifier thats easy to verify - your fingerprint. I think SSN + fingerprint plus a letter sent to my home that needs to be signed should be the minimum to open any line of credit. SSN alone should be worthless.
Its also bothersome that PCI-DSS and other regulations treat credit cards like NSA secrets, which is fine as they should be encrypted, but there's no legislation or guidelines to make SSN's encrypted. SSN's sit as plain-text in every database in the US. That's kind of scary and probably invites hacks.
Not to mention everyone already carries a unique identifier thats easy to verify - your fingerprint.
Actually a surprising number of people don't. For either medical (dermatitis), work (manual laborer wearing them out, operation room personnel scrubbing them out...) or age related reasons.
>I'm guessing its some kind of privacy issue behind there not being a similar system in US?
The social security system, which is a federal program, produced a unique number for all citizens. The states quickly started using this number in their own bureaucracy and everyone else followed (banks, etc). Now its a defacto numeric identifier.
The big problem here is how easy it is to get credit in my name if you have my SSN, like its the root password to my finances. Credit is far too easy to get in the states from a paperwork perspective. I should not fear other people getting my SSN. Banks and other organizations need to realize that if someone presents my SSN, that doesn't mean its me. More numbers or psuedo-SSN's aren't the fix here. The fix is due diligence and better fraud protections.
Not to mention everyone already carries a unique identifier thats easy to verify - your fingerprint. I think SSN + fingerprint plus a letter sent to my home that needs to be signed should be the minimum to open any line of credit. SSN alone should be worthless.
Its also bothersome that PCI-DSS and other regulations treat credit cards like NSA secrets, which is fine as they should be encrypted, but there's no legislation or guidelines to make SSN's encrypted. SSN's sit as plain-text in every database in the US. That's kind of scary and probably invites hacks.