alt Hacker NewsYou can argue that, but then what is its purpose? Why should anyone care about the creation date of a by-design completely arbitrary thing?
I bet people will extract that date and use it, and it's hard to imagine use which wouldn't be abuse. To take the example of a PN/SSN and the usual gender bit: do you really want anyone to be able to tell that you got a new ID at that time? What could you suspect if a person born in 1987 got a new PN/SSN around 2022?
Leaks like that, bypassing whatever access control you have in your database, is just one reason to use real random IDs. But it's even a pretty good one in itself.
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> You can argue that, but then what is its purpose? Why should anyone care about the creation date of a by-design completely arbitrary thing?
Pretty sure sorting and filtering them by date/time range in a database is the purpose.
> You can argue that, but then what is its purpose?
The purpose is to reduce randomness while still preserving probability of uniqueness. UUIDv4 come with performance issues when used to bucket data for updates, such as when there used as primary keys in a database.
A database like MySQL or PostgreSQL has sequential ids and you’d use those instead, but if you’re writing something like iceberg tables using Trino/Spark/etc then being able to generate unique ids (without using a data store) that tend to be clustered together is useful.
I would argue that is one of very few situations where leaking the timestamp that the ID was created when you already have the ID is a possible concern at all.
And when working with very large datasets, there are very significant downsides to large, completely random IDs (which is of course what the OP is about).
> What could you suspect if a person born in 1987 got a new PN/SSN around 2022?
Thank you for spelling it for me. For the readers, It leaks information that the person is likely not a natural born citizen. The assumption doesn't have to be a hundred percent accurate, There is a way to make that assumption And possibly hold it against you.
And there are probably a million ways that a record created date could be held against you If they don't put it in writing, how will you prove They discriminated against you.
Thinking... I don't have a good answer to this. If data exists, people will extract meaning from it whether rightly or not.