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I agree with your assessment here. But the first thing I thought of when I saw this headline was fixing the fact that SSNs are massively bad as authentication. Instead of giving people a number to authenticate, we should be using public key crypto and digital signatures. If the Equifax hack is the catalyst that pushes us to public key crypto instead of SSNs, then I'm all for it.

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I totally agree. We need to throw our reliance on SSN out the window since the hackers are selling all of ours on the dark web as I speak. I like the idea floated out here or some other strong ID route such as SSH keys between 2 parties. All adult American SSN have been compromised so we have to move on to something else that offers stronger deterrents against hackers or ahole credit bureau agencies like Equifax who steal consumers financial data and make it broadly available for hacking.

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