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."

Gathering? Been happening for over a decade

[davidwr]

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.

stupid

[circletimessquare]

so now records which were easily identifiable will be obscure and hard to locate

oh yeah, right, this is always a good thing. because what the city hall of tacoma washington is used for is the fascist illuminati overlords attempting to turn you into slaves. not, you know, trying to buy land or registering a marriage certificate. you know, mundane every day things you WANT to be easy and painless. clearly, we have to worry about our irrational fears of being controlled by bogeymen from bad hollywood movies we watch and take as the truth of existence. pffft

make your choice slashdot: a "cash-strapped", as you say, municipality that can function for you because records are easy to locate, or one that... drum roll please... is like pulling nails out of your nailbed everytime you just want to buy some land or get a divorce

leave the social security numbers on the documents, please

the privacy above all costs idiots here on slashdot make me want to puke

bolt of lightning for some of you: there are actually real world limits on privacy... that make sense

REALLY

Re:Doesn't Matter

[profplump]

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.

Re:Gathering? Been happening for over a decade

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Security through economics

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:stupid

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>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.

Re:Blah blah blah

[MollyB]

Why doesn't someone grow a pair testicles ...

For the same reason you don't grow a pair of ovaries, sir.
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...