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Actually we haven't had social security numbers in Finland since 1971 when they were changed to national identification numbers. The number is not public and you aren't required to give it to every company. A company may require it only if they loan you money or something that is comparable to money (such as subscription from a phone operator, car rental etc.).

National identification number is used in every governmental office and in every private contract that you make in Finland and it really identifies you. Many companies just ask for you id number and you're cleared to do changes to your contracts or order extra services on phone. You can for example end a phone sim card subscription for everyone on the published list just by calling operator customer service and pretending to be someone else.

So this i really a big deal.

Phone and address information is public but not free. You can also ask Population register Centre (click to check out population of Finland live) to hide your address information and operators to hide your phone number so that private companies and citizens can't find it out anywhere.

Yes. Big brother watches us every moment but it doesn't really bother us.

Finland and Sweden was ahead in the whole census. Finland and Sweden started census in about middle of year 1600. and year 1750 already had every person in register.
At leat on start of year 2001, Finland and Denmark were only countries on world what could make census just with a computers and there were no need to go by door to door or using a mixed other kind databases together.

And at least on Finland, Civil register includes a lots of other information too than just name, address, phonenumber, education, marriage status. But it includes information of buildings and all kind other stuff what helps to build charts almost everything.

http://www.vaestorekisterikeskus.fi/vrk/home.nsf/www/populationinformationsystem
http://www.maistraatti.fi/en/index.html
http://tilastokeskus.fi/index_en.html

And even that Finland collects this kind adata alots, most important thing is that there are laws for individuals to protect their indentity.

Actually, half of the Finland lives in very small area in Helsinki and surrounding cities. Anything north from the road Kehä III is jokingly called the "untamed wilderness".
Maybe half of the rest live in the other bigger cities (Tampere, Turku, Oulu, and couple of others) and thus the rest 25% of population is scattered around the rest of the country. Yet, we can get DSL and GSM+E-GPRS in pretty much anywhere in the country. 3G is still picking up. You can only get that in bigger cities at the moment.

What you latest bought from the shop is known by the shopping chains marketdroids, how many bonus cards you said you have? Library information, I guess nobody else is interested harvesting it other than United States at the moment. For public interest, I last read Terry Pratchett btw. In Finland, we do have the national ID database. Expenses are 28M a year. From every citizen we record things like name, address, citizenship, date of birth, birthplace and so forth. Postal office gets records from same DB. When you move, fill out a form, and mail comes to a new place fluently. They also keep building records database for uses like fire&rescue, ownership etc., voting register (people eglible to vote) and issue national electronic ID cards with which you can identify yourself for good in gov't net services. I don't really get how it makes my or any others life worse, but it certainly makes life lot easier. Sweden had first ID records from it's citizens 15th century, and church kept records for many centuries. What's one nice thing also, you see amount of citzens without explicitly counting them out once in a decade. They update the counter (i.e. 'suomen väkiluku') every mon-fri noon. Not totally real-time thou. : http://www.vaestorekisterikeskus.fi/ In China, problems are different level, there are like over million people with overlapping ID's (same SSN issued twice) and things like that. They really need to renew the thing, as current scheme was totally not designed for such amount of people in firstplace.

...Also in Finland. Here you can read from SSN your date of birth, gender (in case you don't know it) and that you were the Nth child to be born that day. In Finland, it takes only about an hour before SSN is assigned to a newborn child.
We have an organisation called Väestörekisterikeskus or Population Register Centre, go read there. One of the upsides of this system is, for example, whenever you decide to move, you don't have to file a dozen address changes: all the government agencies get the info from the PRC, for which the filing announcement of address change is mandatory.

I've never thought this system is Orwellian in any way, actually it makes me feel safer about my own identity in society and it is very difficult for anyone to impersonate me, since my SSN is recorded in my bank account details, motor vehicle register, driver's licence, passport, weapon carry permits, ad infinitum.

Also, Finnish ID cards, driver's licenses and passports are incredibly hard to counterfeit.

It's rarely about the system, it's more often about how and to what purposes it's used.

Not Finland. Even though it has a Data Protection Act, it's Population Register Center sells/supplies name/address/demographic information to direct marketers and individuals unless you opt out.

Here in Finland we have had electronic ID cards for a year now. It's a smart card with users ID, various personal keys and some other data in a chip. Keys are stored only on the card (no copies anywhere). You need a card reader for your PC (later cellphone/PDA/DigiTV...) to use the card. You can use the card when dealing with official bureaux, private business, e-commerce etc, and you can have different keys for different purposes on your card (lotsa memory on it). Nice, eh?

Our official elections are still pen and paper, but next fall there will be sortof 'youth municipal election' (please don't make me explain that!) in which you can vote by internet and even by SMS!