InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Keith Hazelton <>]

I'm asking for a range of answers to the question "Why have we in the US spent so much time and resource into getting the SSN out of our systems and data files?"  I have recently seen opinions that it's really only because the SSN was used as part of an authentication solution.  It may seem obvious to some that there is more to it, but I'm asking you to state the various concerns that led us to push back so hard on their widespread use.

Why?  High-energy discussions around person identifiers are swirling around the US again.  A new push from several quarters for a "globally unique, persistent and portable identifier" is driving the discussion.  This is often jokingly introduced as "The SSN was perfect, but we can't use that, so..."

Help enrich the discussion by contributing your answers.  One place this will surface is on the InCommon, Internet2 and Educause-sponsored "IAM Online" series this Wednesday, Jan. 12 at 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, "A Panel Discussion about Persistent Identifiers for Education" (see http://www.incommon.org/iamonline/ for details).