I think it's a bit late to start treating SSNs as anything more than an essentially public piece of identifying information, like your name and address that you

I think it's a bit late to start treating SSNs as anything more than an essentially public piece of identifying information, like your name and address that you give out to anybody you buy anything from. I think every public school teacher I ever had handled my SSN. Sometimes my schools would, for convenience, post grades or exam results in the halls using only SSNs so that nobody could supposedly know what anybody else's grades were. Being a competitive sort, I always wanted to know who else was getting good grades, and it was easy to figure out. The idea that anybody is treating SSNs as sensitive information is a little bit alarming, because that cat is out of the bag.