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Cringely on Identity Theft
Boiled Frog writes "Prompted by the theft of his mail, Cringely investigates how easy it is to steal identities from government publications. In this article he explains how he got the identities of 300,000 people which he calculates to be valued at $65 billion dollars. If Cringely can do it, anyone can."
How in the world does using a PO box protect you from identity theft? They can't steal your incoming mail? Not to worry, the post office will probably put it in the wrong box. Happened to me on a bi-weekly basis.
You're protecting your address? If someone finds your SSN, they can easily obtain your address. Since your PO box is probably in the same zipcode you live in (it is the closes post office, right?), they'll have the zipcode correct when trying to do a search.
If you use your PO box as your address for everything, then what are you protecting? Won't everything (credit cards, credit bureaus) be updated to use the PO box? Its just data sitting in an address field? How does the prefix 'PO Box' protect you?