Comment by gwerbin
5 hours ago
Out of curiosity how do you authenticate yourself with government services and finance companies and such? The reason the SSN is considered private is because it's used for authentication. Usually an SSN + one or two pieces of trivially obtainable information is enough to sign up for just about anything in somebody else's name, unless physical documents are required as in the case of a passport.
With cryptographic keys, normally stored on a smartphone. BankID[0] is the most common solution, but there are others. I personally use biometric 2fa to log in, and PIN to sign contracts or pay.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)