John Theune wrote:
I'll addresss the last first. You really think your name is a good
identifier? Have you looked at a phone book lately?

only one guy in the rest of the USA with the same last name, who
design fancy women shoes in New York :-) definitely nobody else
with the same combination of first name and last name; ok, may
be I am a bit of an exception here, but this is good enough for a
business or bank, especially when coupled with an account
number.

but at some point there is need for crossover between the systems and
having multiple numbers will increase the chance of a mismatch being made.

why? what possible reason would your bank have to know your
medical history? or history of phone calls?


As far as SSN not being unique, the system was designed to have it be
unique, if it broke down then fix it.

it has broken down, and it has not been fixed.

I just spent several minutes
goggling on the "SSN Not Unique" and while it had many hits none of them
said anything about the number being assigned to multiple people.

as good as Google is, this is not the only source of info out there
by the way.


I think you need to remove your tinfoil hat here.

Ah, the good ol' 'you are paranoid' argument; right next to
the 'but, I have nothing to hide' argument.

if you believe that all that's needed is additional regulations to
protect you, then you are naive. May be, you might be lucky to
live at a time when the current administration is indeed following
its own rules, and respect due process, and all that. But
information collected about you will outlive any administration;

now may be you are right, may be I am paranoid and we will never
live in a country where one's freedom of travel can be limited by secret
lists which you cannot correct, where due process is no longer
respected, where one can be imprisoned indefinitely and tortured without
access to a lawyer or the evidence used against him, only based
on bad intel collected via non transparent means, where
the constitution becomes just a 'goddamn piece of paper', etc. yeah,
it can be only a bad dream, my imagination is really running wild,
cannot possibly happen here.

Your bank has no
legitimate reason to cross reference your account and your phone calls
nor will they as they is no business reason for them to do so.

then why make it easily available in the first place? oh, I get
it; you can trust them, they are good people, why would they
want to do you harm? nay, they'll never be tempted to sell your
information to the best bidder, even when it becomes one of the
hottest commodity in these days and age, why would they? it is not
as if they would want to make money, just to look after your welfare.
And in any case, you can trust the government to take care of it
and look after your best interest should it ever be abused. Right.

now, you are good at googling; find out what was the first large
scale use of information technology -- beware, it predates electronic
computers -- where cross referencing of seemingly innocuous personal
information was used to its full potential (search for 'Edwin Black',
should be mandatory reading to anyone taking up an IT course);

Sorry for being so completely off the topic of this group, but
this is a serious matter, where complacency eventually kills.

--Sylvain