Sounds like our SSN is similar to your tax id. It’s assigned at birth and never changes.

The real problem is that for decades virtually every company and other entity that needed to uniquely identify a person used your SSN as well, despite the federal government saying it shouldn’t be used that way. For whatever reason they never enforced that, but just said “pretty please”… So now virtually everything from taxes to library books to bank accounts to utility bills are tied to our SSNs.