I’m gonna rant here, but a big problem is that SSNs were never designed to be used as an identifier. It was simply used to allow someone to receive Social Secur

I’m gonna rant here, but a big problem is that SSNs were never designed to be used as an identifier. It was simply used to allow someone to receive Social Security, hence the name. They literally used to have the text “Not to be used for verification.” As for its problems, there’s quite a few, but the two big ones IMO are (1) no check digits and (2) (up until relatively recently) they’re sequential. I don’t know when the change was, but if you take a SSN issued before 2000, you could add one to your whole SSN and it would be a valid one. They may even have been born on the same day as you in the same hospital. Also, you could find out a general area where someone was living when it was issued (usually birth) using the first 3 digits.