The basic problem is that, many years ago, we somehow decided as a country that your SSN was a valid GUID for a person, and one that could be used to secure lin

The basic problem is that, many years ago, we somehow decided as a country that your SSN was a valid GUID for a person, and one that could be used to secure lines of credit and all sorts of other things. At the same time, we decided that there was no reason to make it properly secured or obscure, or to make it easy to make a new one, or anything else. So, it's this kind of quasi-bad thing that is mostly just good for getting your identity stolen.