This is a more sensible expression of the concern. Your initial post was easily confused with a common ill-advised perspective. I might not be able to do much

This is a more sensible expression of the concern. Your initial post was easily confused with a common ill-advised perspective. I might not be able to do much with "jwr", but I could build an entire profitable identity around your SSN. Your real concern is that identifiers and authentication must be separate and treated as such, while in practice one number/string is used for both purposes - hence the concern of "stealing numbers", as having the identifier means having the authentication. Insofar as there may be a separate authenticating token, all too often it is so weak that the identifier is used as part of the authentication; having the identifier may be enough for access, or enough that deducing the remaining authentication token may be fairly trivial (say, a 4-digit PIN); this being tax day in the USA, we're quite aware that many tax returns will be fraudulent, requesting large refunds based on mere possession of a SSN identifier and a smattering of other public data. We should be using real cryptographic private keys of substantial length for authentication, leaving the public identifier public so that having one (or a slew) gets one nowhere without the hard-to-obtain authentication tokens. As for the downvotes and the need to craft comments carefully: yes, the need for careful wording is the norm. We're trying to cram a lot of information and opinion into a very small space, which will be read very quickly by a great many people of wildly varying perspectives interpreting the post, making it very easy to misinterpret intent (doesn't help that there are a lot of dumb & ill-advised posts, setting expectations quite low). The greatest problem is refining short easily-read posts to withstand accusations which demand encyclopedic thoroughness. One of my motivations for prolific posting around the 'net is precisely to exercise & refine my ability to post views in a concise & persuasive manner (and if that gets bizarrely construed as "he must have multiple accounts, know a lot of people, and persuades others to downvote opposing views" then I must be getting somewhere with that ability).