alt Hacker NewsThis totally reminds me of SSN use, when initially they were just a number (not secret) to identify a person, and then suddenly people started to use them as a key for authorisation, because someone had a bright idea how to implement things fast/simple/cheap (cheap part comes at expense of others)
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lpribis • today at 8:43 AM
Rather than being about fast/simple/cheap, I think using SSN as a key was more about the fact that SSN is the only common identifier that almost all US citizens have.
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Tax ids were never meant to be used as a form of global identification. If you go look in a real bank core, you'll find this field does not have any uniqueness constraints.