It's already "bogged down" - I described a direct concern. Brushing that aside is equivalent to saying the concerns don't matter.
Social security numbers were introduced for the sole purpose of administering the social security program. The protections on private entities abusing them were neutered, which is how we ended up with the backwards regime under discussion. People have a vague fear that social security numbers are important and shouldn't be casually shared, which is the only thing holding back (for example) grocery stores from demanding your social security number to get the regular prices.
If say the US issued everyone a cryptographic identity via a smart card, there would be little stopping every single business from demanding that you scan this card. Imagine needing to link your singular legal identity to every single online service, so they could better associate your surveillance records. Big tech is currently doing its best to accomplish this through phone numbers, but at least it's possible to get additional phone numbers.
The nature of the problem you are describing (private companies having a more reliable unique ID to correlate data than phone number) seems incrementally worse than what we have today. In practice, most people rarely, if ever, change their phone number. I don't like that companies demand my phone number to get cheaper groceries, but in practice I just type in "(local area code) 867-5309" [1] into whatever terminal is asking for my phone number and get the discount 100% of the time.
The consequences of the problem the proposal is trying to address seem larger to me. Currently, you can be denied access to capital and even basic financial services because identity management has been outsourced to unreliable third parties with no incentive to do a better job.
Yes, I agree it is incrementally worse. I agree that de facto, the surveillance industry is practically inescapable. The technical ability to avoid various forms of tracking requires an extreme amount of effort and unreasonableness. I myself will put in such unreasonable effort on many things, but I still cannot manage to do so for everything.
Still, there is a difference between this de facto state of affairs, and a de jure mandate from the government to make us more trackable.
If were talking about the deficiencies causing the original topic, the right answer is to rebuke this nonsensical concept of "identity theft" and make companies fully liable for their attempted frauds (ala the top level comment of this tree). If we're talking about constructively building systems to do things the "right way", then privacy needs to be incorporated in such systems from the ground up, as the previous bait and switch with social security numbers has demonstrated.
Social security numbers were introduced for the sole purpose of administering the social security program. The protections on private entities abusing them were neutered, which is how we ended up with the backwards regime under discussion. People have a vague fear that social security numbers are important and shouldn't be casually shared, which is the only thing holding back (for example) grocery stores from demanding your social security number to get the regular prices.
If say the US issued everyone a cryptographic identity via a smart card, there would be little stopping every single business from demanding that you scan this card. Imagine needing to link your singular legal identity to every single online service, so they could better associate your surveillance records. Big tech is currently doing its best to accomplish this through phone numbers, but at least it's possible to get additional phone numbers.