American bureaucracies have a bizarre obsession with them. My school issued student IDs with unique numbers, which should have been the end of all such issues.<p>Unfortunately, they made a bizarre system where US students had their student ID be their SSN with a fixed prefix, and international students got a random number with other prefixes. They refused to give up on using SSN even when they knew it wouldn&#x27;t work for a good portion of students.<p>Heaven forbid someone just add an SSN to student ID lookup table to the database.