It’s supposed to be this super duper important and secret number, but you have to bring a physical copy to work miles away from home for some stranger to copy. Many times you have to provide the number to even apply for a job and it ends up at who knows where because the application is on a third party private website. :agony-deep:
Despite being absolutely necessary to run a modern society, the United States has stubbornly refused for a very long time to institute a real national ID number system. But seeing as it’s completely necessary, once one federal agency assigned every person a unique ID number for their own use, every other government agency and private actor said “Guess we’ll use that!”
Problem is since SSNs weren’t supposed to be national ID numbers they’re basically the worst most insecure version of a national ID system you could possibly create
“B-but implementing an actually efficient system for one of the most common yet important processes in life is literally 1987!!1!”