You missing the point. A single person exposing their SSN right now will suffer, but if everyone's SSN is accepted the companies would have to acknowledge that SSN is no longer secret (in fact it never was intended to be secret).

This whole mess could be trivially fixed by credit bureaus introducing a PIN for every person and require it for opening a new credit line (issue is whether they could keep it safe, but at least it would resolve this problem).

They even already have such mechanism in place, which is done through freezing the file. The problem is that for some crazy reason we are charged when we are trying to protect ourselves.

You forgot your credit score.

The number itself doesn't tell you much. The score of someone who was constantly indebted can be high as long as they always paid on time. Higher than for someone who earns >$100k per year and never needed to take on debt. Obviously very low scores tell you that something's likely wrong (if the data is correct), but medium to high scores without the credit report don't say much about a person.

That is after all what we're talking about here.

This seems a bit like replying to a suggestion that the world would be a better place without nuclear weapons by telling the other person to unilaterally disarm.

086385955

819

New Hampshire, eh

Donald Trump's SSN

Only if you're old enough.