Trusting your Social Security Number

I used to try to protect my Social Security Number. You know… identity theft and all. But some time in the past 2 years, it became obvious that this number is as ubiquitious as my first name. Everybody who wants to already knows it. You might as well say, “Hey, 123-44-8789, I have something for you”.

My angst has been increasingly directed not at the collectors. I’m still upset everybody collected it so much until it was an abused number. The big Info Suck computers allow. But that’s history. The problem now is that anybody asking you your Social thinking that everybody else in the world doesn’t know it, has a problem. The user of your social has become the problem.

Bob Brown, in the 1/18/07 issue of Network World, wrote up an interview with Jeff Schiller, MIT’s Network Manager/Security Architect. Part 5 of the interview assertively supports the view I’ve slowly developed over the past few years.