Social Suicide

Using your Social Security number for identi cation is a really bad ID  

- Kevin Maney

ALBANIANS ARE ISSUED A HACK resistant, digital national ID card called the Letërnjoftimi. It comes with a cool hologram and a biometric chip that can be read wirelessly.

At the bottom of some drawer in my New York City apartment, I have a rotting white cardboard rectangle that shows my nine-digit Social Security number in a typeface that looks like it came from a Smith-Corona typewriter. It’s supposed to serve as my all purpose identifier for life. So, yeah, when it comes to an ID that serves as a gateway to modern economic activity, the U.S. is 80 years behind a nation where nearly half the population is employed growing olives and figs.

The federal government and pretty much all of industry have known for decades that the Social Security number needs to be put out of our misery. You can find reports from the 1970s that document concern about using SSNs for identification. Over the past 10 years, as mobile phones, social media and cloud computing have opened up every aspect of our lives to potential privacy invasion, experts and activists have grown more vociferous on the topic. Then, over the summer, the Equifax data breach released 143 million SSNs into the wild, like dandelion spores wafting off a hilltop.

After the Equifax screwup, anyone with a cerebrum realized an SSN is about as secret as Kim Kardashian’s sex life. And we all know Equifax will not be the end of such disasters. It’s not as if we’ve got hacking under control the way we do smallpox.