Comment by acdha

SSNs have always been clear that they’re identifiers, not authenticators - it’s printed on the card! The problem are the businesses who tried to skimp by treating them as secrets, and they invented the mainstream concept of identity theft to make it sound like their negligence should be your problem.

The fix should be simple: stop taking companies seriously when they only used an SSN for authentication. Ideally there’d be a law adding penalties: try to bill someone for a loan authenticated only by common metadata and they have to pay the target a penalty fine, allow insurers to deny claims, etc. As soon as it costs them money, they’d suddenly find the money to check ID like everyone else.