In discussions with Ars, a university official said that prior to 2012, Columbia received prospective student information, including Social Security numbers, from a wide range of sources. During that period, student recruitment services, scholarship programs, and testing programs often shared SSNs with Columbia, presumably with students’ consent.

A student might consent to share their SSN, the official said, to receive information about various schools or scholarship programs. Or they might directly request that a testing program share their SSN along with their scores. Ars reached out to the College Board and the ACT, which operate two major college testing programs, and confirmed that both stopped sharing SSNs as student identifiers. The College Board ended the practice in 2018, and ACT said it had stopped about a decade ago.

Columbia discontinued its use of SSNs as student identifiers in 2012, the official told Ars. It had also intended to delete SSNs collected before the breach occurred. But despite completing initiatives to remove SSNs and other sensitive personal data from its systems, the official said Columbia inadvertently missed a legacy database containing my SSN.

Since Colombia repeatedly lied and hedged, can even this information be trusted?

The US really needs to get a proper census system, the fact that they have no national ID number is fucking dumb.

Though, with the current administration I get the reluctance.

It would however make voter fraud much harder.