The EU has a federated public key cryptography based identity system. The member states recognize identities issued by other member states, but there is no central system.

In any case, the private key is stored on a plastic ID, which acts as a smart card and can be hooked up to a smartphone/PC for identity verification and document signing online. The key is only released with a PIN, and the databases online only store the corresponding public key.

A leak of a public key without the private key is (relative to SSN) harmless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS

Can we please have this in the US?

1. A cosmic ray storm turned all ASCII charactees into ECBDIC

2. Lightning struck the 12 V feed and upped the voltage to 10 MV, turning all 0 and 1’s into 6’s

3. Someone spilled a New England Pale Ale on the server

4. The process was assinated by the mysterious killer only known from his modus operandi of leaving OOM written in blood across the syslog

5. Birds nested within the server and fed all the SATA cables to their babies

Seriously though, disk writes aren’t atomic.

And ruin the marketing value of long history of status page showing green?

I feel some companies have the following meaning for the lights: yellow is when servers are literally on fire. Red is when the CEO is bleeding out somewhere on the floor, and the Feds are about to bust in and close the shop.