Don't think parent poster was trying to mislead. Sounds more like poster is complaining that SSNs got overloaded beyond their original purpose (as guids for the

Don't think parent poster was trying to mislead. Sounds more like poster is complaining that SSNs got overloaded beyond their original purpose (as guids for the SSA) to being used for business authentication more generally and that because they started being used for purposes they weren't originally intended or designed for, it ended up being a generally bad at it. I tend to agree. Best practices are that we shouldn't use guids as authentication/security mechanisms in software systems because 1. they aren't necessarily random so it's difficult to prevent fraud as a result of guessing and 2. you can't rectify authentication issues (e.g. via rotation of authentication or adding additional entropy) without compromising the identification function see (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122#section-6). We should never have used them as authentication methods IRL.