Think Advisor featured comments by Jeremy Grant on May 25, 2018, in an article on the need for policies that enhance security, privacy, and convenience regarding Social Security numbers.
Mr. Grant told lawmakers that the government must recognize the contradiction surrounding Social Security numbers and "take steps to put policies in place that are more consistent and put us on a path toward a system that enhances security and privacy and convenience for Americans." The SSN "is simultaneously presumed to be both secret and public — secret, because we tell individuals to guard their SSN closely; public, because we have multiple laws that require individuals to give it out to facilitate all sorts of interactions with industry and government," Grant said.
Grant continued, "Secret because we then tell those entities to ensure that if they store it, which the law often requires them to do, that it be protected. And public because it’s proven quite hard to do to the point that the majority of Americans' SSNs have been compromised multiple times over the last several years amidst the wave of data breaches."