Each American citizen is assigned a social security number, which is only nine digits in length, and routinely we are asked to give out the last four digits of our social security number to credit card companies, cell phone companies, utility companies, and so forth, all as a basic form of ID. The problem with the de facto usage of a social security number as your national ID, is the number itself, is given out too frequently to way too many entities, in which if the nine digits of your social security card should be compromised by those of nefarious principles, this will wreck incredible havoc on your life, your identity, and your ability to use and to sustain credit, with these types of data breaches being routinely accomplished successfully all of the time.
The fact of the matter is that federal laws should be passed, acted upon, and enforced, precluding your social security number as ever being used for identification purposes, which was something that was once printed upon social security numbers when they were issued when they clearly stated: "for social security purposes--not for identification". It doesn't take a genius to recognize, that banking entities recognized the convenience of making it their policy to get consumers to divulge their social security numbers since each social security number uniquely identified that individual, even though, uniquely identifying individuals could have been done in myriad ways, but that might have involved a bit more legwork for the banks.
Instead, citizens of the United States have been placed into a situation, to which they can do little to protect and to properly secure their unique social security number and thereby they are at risk at having their identity and their credit resources of being compromised at any given time. The way to prevent this from happening is to turn back the clock and to stop posthaste the use of social security numbers as ID. Think about this, a credit card is sixteen digits long, with a date code, and a special 3-digit code, to which you also need to know the billing zip code, and these cards are routinely compromised all of the time. Yet, consumers fortunately have protection for credit cards that are used by unauthorized people, with the banks and merchants losing billions of dollars each year to credit card fraud.
Since, the social security card is normally used as the foundation for the application of credit, a sophisticated thief, with your social security number, could steal thousands of dollars from unwitting merchants and banks, destroying your credit as well as compromising your ID, forcing you to spend a considerable amount of time and energy just to recover your identity; which could take years to successfully accomplish, with lots of paperwork and notarized documents necessary, just to get back to normal.
Your social security number is too short, uses only numeric characters which makes it fundamentally flawed, and it is virtually impossible to reasonably protect, yet it is used time and time again as your ID, which simply exacerbates the entire problem. America is the richest nation in the world, and the social security number is the foundational key for the unauthorized attainment of those riches by those who know how to exploit our current system, with billions of dollars awaiting them as their unjustified reward.