This is long overdue.

In France, the privacy watchog CNIL was founded in 1978 when the idea of using the social security number for all sorts of other purposes got proposed (and rejected), prompting for some safeguards.

In the US, we've been so allergic to a "national ID card" that we just re-purposed the SSN into the very same thing. But then we decided to make it both a unique ID and a password, despite it being a terrible way to perform authentication (and an even worse way to do authorization).