Website Posts Partial SSNs of Politicians in Protest

John3 writes "The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights has posted partial Social Security numbers for several California politicians to protest their vote against pending privacy legislation. According to a San Francisco Chronicle story, the SSNs were purchased on the Internet for $26." Now there's an effective way of showing the problems of the status quo.

Comments

SB1386 tie in

[eericson]

What I find amusing about this situation is that these are the same leglislators (scuse the spelling) that unanimously voted for SB1386 when their bank/credit info was compromised, yet don't want to take that last step now to protect everyone's privacy.

The more time I spend in CA the more I realize our state legislators are like ill trained puppies: They're cute to look at, but occassionally you need to whack them with a magazine to keep them from crapping on the carpet.

-E2

Re:Whoop deedoo

[KingArthur10]

Actually, the credit beuru once accidently typed in the wrong SSN of a convicted felon. After that, the man's SSN that they typed in was suddenly not able to find a job or get credit for anything. After at least 10 years in the gutter, one of the people he looked to employment said to him "we don't hire people with your history". The man began inquiring what that must mean and found out that the credit bearu screwed up his account by saying he was a convicted felon. He then sued the bearu for a good 20-50million dollars and is now living on easy street. All I was really trying to say is that if someone wants to get your SSN, all they have to do is act like an employer and do a credit check. There are a million other ways, too. When I worked at CVS, our login code was our SSN. All someone had to do would be watch closely a few times, and wham, they've got it.

SSN: Public or Confidential Information?

[GillBates0]

Social Security numbers were originally intended to be used only by the social security program and were supposed to make record keeping easier. They were never meant to function as an authentication mechanism.

The problem arose when the mapping between a person's name (or identity) and the SSN was considered confidential information, and a number of government and non government organizations started treating the knowledge of a person's SSN as an authentication mechanism.

Many companies treat the fact that you know (the last 4 digits of) a social security number combined with some additional information like the last name and street address as proof that you are indeed who the record states you are.

This is absurd. Either each individual should be assigned a secret id, which when used in conjunction with the SSN proves one's identity, or some other mechanism to verify identity should be developed. As long as the SSN continues to be (ab)used as a supposedly public index into a database, as well as a piece of confidential information, privacy will remain a farce.