There is a pretty elegant solution in Europe: you're given an ID card (as a foreigner I paid €28 euro to get one of these in favour of a paper-based equivalent

There is a pretty elegant solution in Europe: you're given an ID card (as a foreigner I paid €28 euro to get one of these in favour of a paper-based equivalent containing just the personal number/tax ID, not sure how it works as a citizen). It's also the same with the Estonian e-residence (and naturally the normal one too). Most services use public key crypto and your ID card doubles up as the thing you use to cryptographically sign any documents that require proof of ID. You can do this yourself for many official documents with a generic smart card reader, and most places that would require ID in general (like your bank) will use that same system too. The nature of the system means that while there's still likely to be a list of personal/tax numbers lying around, they are not the secret and there isn't a central database of everybody's private keys out there. If the root cert is compromised it can be renewed and card holders can refresh their card through some system or another (where I lived I had to take it to an office for them to do it for me). I enjoyed using that in favour of the UK method of telling somebody where I lived for three years and where I was born, along with various other details, in order for them to become convinced of who I am. All I had to do in Europe was plug in my ID and that was enough proof. Of course, implementing such a scheme in the US and UK seems to be politically toxic for various reasons that can be summarised as paranoia (whether that's warranted or not), where the potential for the government to abuse it in myriad dystopian, conspiratorial ways is still far, far worse than what the corporate megaliths are doing with all of that information already, for profit, as if the natural state of government is to be less trustworthy than a corporation despite reality showing otherwise time and time again.