More Like Social Insecurity Number, Amirite?

We've all known Social Security numbers were pointless as security devices ever since the LifeLock guy was brutally owned over and over for putting his own social on a damn drive-around billboard, but now they're dead forever. Rest in peace! Also, why did you exist?

This is where we're supposed to go into the long history of how, in 1936, the US government decided that every American would be assigned a nine-digit number "for the sole purpose" of tracking their earning history. In the absence of a national ID system, the SSN became a de-facto identifier, even though it was never designed as such. Blah, blah, blah. Thursday, Equifax, a credit monitoring and security company got hacked (who will protect the protectors?) 143 million SSN numbers were exposed, which is nearly half of Americans if you're keeping count. This must be—it has to be—the final nail in a coffin that should have been burned or buried years ago.

This is testimony given to Congress sixteen years ago by Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Since 2001, Rotenberg and other privacy experts have been shouting about the SSN-pocalypse. Shoulda listened to Marc!

Reached by email today, 16 years after his testimony, Rotenberg told us: "SSN. The eternal privacy issue."

"Too many organizations continue to rely on the SSN as an identifier," he said. "And the fact that Experian—a company that advises consumers and companies on how to deal with ID theft—got hacked is beyond belief."

Huge numbers of SSNs have been hacked, leaked, or otherwise mishandled in major data breaches at Equifax, Experian, the Office of Personnel Management, the Kansas Department of Commerce and others.

Given that half of all Americans SSNs are not secret anymore, what's the point of treating SSNs as secret, unique identifiers? As former Motherboard managing editor Adrianne Jeffries explained after her SSN was hacked in the Experian breach in 2015, the way we use SSNs for identification purposes is stupid:

SSNs were never designed to be secure, we should stop pretending they are, because they're not and haven't ever been. Burn the SSN.

"With [the Equifax] compromise, and the OPM one, at this point it's easier for attackers to prove they're 'you' than you can," a security consultant that goes by the name Munin, wrote in a Tweet.

You may think it doesn't matter that your SSN could be floating around out there. Let's check in with our man Todd: