> The underlying problem is the existence of centralized identity, as opposed to decentralized identity. There is also an underlying problem of reliance upon p

> The underlying problem is the existence of centralized identity, as opposed to decentralized identity. There is also an underlying problem of reliance upon publicly available information (and in many cases, one's SSN is publicly available, even before this breach) to authenticate that human body X claiming to be John Smith is in fact actually the John Smith. Public facts, such as SSN, mothers maiden name, or name of first employer, etc. have been relied upon as "secret, known only to John Smith" items for authentication purposes when in reality those facts were never really secret in the first place. The only reason those facts even worked as authentication devices is that pre-internet/pre-google it was exceedingly hard to look most of them up in the public records. Doing so often involved physical travel to multiple disparate archives and physical search through archived paper. And so if unknown human X knew all three it was highly likely X was John Smith because otherwise X had put in an awful lot of effort. Today, with the internet/google, obtaining almost all of these facts from the public records where they have always existed to begin with involves typing in searches, zero physical travel, and no combing through archived paper. The internet has simply exposed the Emperor's New Clothes [1] for what they really were all along. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes