There are 8 billion people on Earth. You are a number sometimes. It's okay for {your passport, your driver's license, your social security card, your credit car

There are 8 billion people on Earth. You are a number sometimes. It's okay for {your passport, your driver's license, your social security card, your credit card, your bank accounts, etc} to treat your account as a number. The SSN just acts as a (largely) unique identifier. In the US, it also serves as proof that someone is eligible to work in the country. It's also the primary key for the account which collects my Social Security earnings over my career. You are asking the wrong question. Neither of the keys you identify, whether it be "123-45-6789" or "JohnHarrySmith19900101NewYork", is "secure". Perhaps the latter has more entropy, but it's not the equivalent of your password when you log into a website -- it's the equivalent of your username. When you fill out a federal form like your tax form, anyone who sees the form sees your Social Security number. If we were talking about making Social Security secure, your Social Security card would be plastic/metal and have a chip in it, similar to an EMV chip. It would have a private key which can be used to sign digital contracts and can be used to generate login tokens. It's effectively a private key that generates different public keys for each interaction/transaction you need to perform with it. Right now, Social Security is entirely about "what you know" with an easy to fabricate "what you have" and has no "who you are" factors.