Canada
The use of the Social Insurance Number (SIN) as a "de facto" ID number ended in 2004 with passage of The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. There are only certain specified instances where an organization may ask for a SIN (namely for tax or retirement benefit related issues). The SIN must be guarded as confidential personal information, and therefore cannot be used as a general ID number.
Read more about this topic: National Identification Number
Famous quotes containing the word canada:
“Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante’s scheme, Limbo is to Hell.”
—Irving Layton (b. 1912)
“In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least several gentlemen or “squires,” there is but one to a seigniory.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)