Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.