SSN isn’t even a well-kept secret, considering you have to give it out for banking, medical, or anywhere else that needs to identify you.
We should have a kind of username / password system instead, where everyone has a unique ID and a separate private ID. We could even use something like RSA so you never have to give out your private ID to anyone.
According to this article, if you get accidentally declared dead in the US, companies and institutions make their own copies of the death records and they aren't kept in sync with the governments. So even after you become alive again, at any moment, someone might switch the bit on their database, and you become dead to few companies again.
Kind of interesting how this HN post shows that transparency is important, because fixing an error like erroneous death in other countries isn't as bad as it is in the US.
Anyway I ended up writing about it as a use case for crypto, because the blockchain part of a transparent ledger is important for being a companion to the public memory: your birth, your marriage, your relationships with relatives, and your death.
We should have a kind of username / password system instead, where everyone has a unique ID and a separate private ID. We could even use something like RSA so you never have to give out your private ID to anyone.