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Pendulum Swinging Toward Privacy
netbuzz writes "The New York Times reports this morning on a gathering movement to remove Social Security numbers from online public records. While justifiable, given the reality of and concerns about identity theft, it also doesn't take much to imagine how such concerns will be abused by public officials who are strapped for cash and/or ethically challenged."
In the 1990s health care plans, universities, and others stopped using SS#s as identifiers out of privacy concerns.
In the last 15-plus years, some public records have also changed identifiers, been removed from the public records, or had SS#s redacted for the same reason.
The pendulum may be moving faster now but the swing began long ago.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem isn't that SSN are used as public identifiers -- having another public identifer would just shift the problem to that number instead of your SSN. And it's unlikely that having a stolen SSN would actually affect your ability ot make SS claims anyway, at least not for very long.
The problem is that your SSN is both a public ID and a secret used to validate that ID. So long as a single bit of information is used as both the public and private bits of that equation there's no way to solve this problem no matter how many ID numbers you generate.
Would is really be so hard to require that new credit accounts can only be issued with a notarized signature? Notary publics are intended to serve just this kind of purpose -- to validate that a particular person really did execute an agreement. It's pretty easy to find a notary public even in rural areas, and they don't report their specific activities to the government, so there's aren't a lot of big-brother concerns with respect to having your documents notarized. Seriously, this seems like a problem we solved 100 years ago.
It took my school until 2004 to stop using our socials for student id. They were printed on our id cards, bus passes, library cards, etc. Even the course roster given to the instructors listed our ssn next to our name.
Then we started using 8 digit id's. The problem? The public numbers are now used as passwords into some systems.
Door locks, armored cars, fences and alarms don't prevent crime, they raise the cost (including risk) above the benefit.
Same here. An SSN has some market value. Cheap automated harvesting is profitable. Driving to a courthouse and copying by hand almost certainly isn't. No profit, no mass crime. The threat is then reduced to stalkers and private detectives.
>leave the social security numbers on the documents, please
Believe me, that muncipality is going to be even more cash-strapped if and when they have to pay for all the damage they cause by publishing SSNs.
Personally, I think the metaphor of having (or growing, if you will...) a Spine or Backbone is more accurate, and includes everyone.
This is slashdot, I know, but, c'mon...