ADIZ Violation Explained in AOPA Magazine

Jose wrote:
there are far too many people who
demand this number even though they have no legitimate
reasons to know it.


Not to mention all those that have "just the last four digits". Most of
the rest of the digits can be reconstructed by anybody who knows how the
system is set up.

Jose
I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any
mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information. Banks and insurance companies have a need to be able to
gather the complete record for a person for giving credit or giving out
payments. If you don't want this single identify to be a SSN, fine then
what would you have it be? You want to come up with a different number?
It will have the same issue as the SSN number. If it falls into the
wrong hands then ID theft may occur. If you want to attack ID theft,
that's a different story. Make the number tie to something that only
you can provide. Some sort of biometric identifier might work. In a
perfect world we would not need a single identifier but given todays
computer system and silos of information we need a way to tie the
systems together.

John

I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single identification number to tie together the various parts of people's information.

I don't want all the various parts of my information to be tied together
by other people for their benefit.

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

John Theune wrote:
I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any
mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information. Banks and insurance companies have a need to be able to
gather the complete record for a person for giving credit or giving out
payments.

you are making two erroneous assumptions; the first, is that
the SSN is guaranteed to be unique, it is not. That fact
has been widely documented and discussed. The second is
that banks and insurances and such need a unique *common*
identification, this is flat wrong; your bank has no legitimate
reasons to cross reference your banking info with, say, your
health care info, or the list of phone calls you made; it is none
of their business;

the problem is both the use and abuse of this number and the
fact that all the entities to whom you entrust your personal
information make no effort to keep it private, and worst,
actively trade and/or exchange it; this fact with the ability
to cross reference information -- not always correctly, the
SSN being a lousy identifier -- is what creates the problem.

It might not have been as much of a problem at a time when
large scale data mining was not as easy as today, but it is
becoming scary. If you are amongst the folks who complacently
think that they have nothing to hide therefore what is all
this fuss about, you do not deserve the freedom you are
currently enjoying (not for long though as things are evolving)

Your bank wants a unique number to identify their client? sure,
let them have their own system; so does your insurance, and
phone companies, etc. I have no problem with that, so long
as each have their own separate system. Besides their is
perfectly good enough means of identifying yourself as far
as commercial or other companies are concerned: your name.

--Sylvain

"John Theune" wrote in message
news:0Fbwf.30749$uy3.6067@trnddc08...
Jose wrote:
there are far too many people who
demand this number even though they have no legitimate
reasons to know it.


Not to mention all those that have "just the last four digits". Most of
the rest of the digits can be reconstructed by anybody who knows how the
system is set up.

Jose
I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any
mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information. Banks and insurance companies have a need to be able to
gather the complete record for a person for giving credit or giving out
payments. If you don't want this single identify to be a SSN, fine then
what would you have it be? You want to come up with a different number?
It will have the same issue as the SSN number. If it falls into the
wrong hands then ID theft may occur. If you want to attack ID theft,
that's a different story. Make the number tie to something that only
you can provide. Some sort of biometric identifier might work. In a
perfect world we would not need a single identifier but given todays
computer system and silos of information we need a way to tie the
systems together.

John

I see absolutely no need for any, much less all, of my information to be
tied together anywhere by anybody.

John Theune wrote:

I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen any
mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information.

As far as I'm concerned, there is a much stronger need to make it impossible for
other people to tie all my information together.

George Patterson
Coffee is only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to
your slightly older self.

Jose wrote:
I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen
any mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information.


I don't want all the various parts of my information to be tied together
by other people for their benefit.

Jose
Not a problem, then don't deal with banks or insurance companies.

I don't want all the various parts of my information to be tied together by other people for their benefit.
Not a problem, then don't deal with banks or insurance companies.

.... or stores, or doctors, or airplanes, or telephones, or employers...

"If you have done nothing wrong, the next administration will re-define
'wrong; for you. Don't worry, it won't hurt.

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jose wrote:
... or stores, or doctors, or airplanes, or telephones, or employers...

or potential dates. I mean, there is no excuses anymore for
bad surprises in this department, when you can find out
someone's detailed medical history -- a must in these days
and age of dating hazards, any dealing with the
law, including as a juvenile, complete history of telephone
calls -- both landlines and cellphones, including unlisted
numbers -- history of online contributions (newsgroups, web,
mailing lists, including the ones you thought were closed
to members only), credit history of course, political and
religious affiliations or lack thereof (if you haven't managed
to guess already from previous info), details of travel
history, purchasing habits, including but not limited to
books read and purchased or simply browsed (someone posted a
pretty neat account on reddit of how one can easily mine data
from Amazon's wish lists -- pretty crude, but it gives a
good idea of what's possible), as well as borrowed from
public libraries (a bit more tricky this one, but feasible
as well -- not out of reach of a self respecting PI), most
of these info already available to anyone for a fee (or for
free with a bit of effort).

No more bad dates (or bad employees or bad tenants) -- 'bad'
being whatever you want it to be. Can't wait for the day
when everyone's complete DNA informations -- along with easy
to use tools to extract whatever info you are seeeking from
it -- make its way into this wealth of freely available data.

Brave new world indeed,

--Sylvain

("Jose" wrote)
"If you have done nothing wrong, the next administration will re-define
'wrong; for you. Don't worry, it won't hurt.


"Your papers please!"


Montblack
"My dear fellow! This isn't Spain ... this is England!"
A Man For All Seasons (1966)
Winner of six Academy Awards - including Best Picture

Sylvain wrote:
John Theune wrote:

I've been following the SSN debate for a bit and I have not yet seen
any mention of the fact that there is a legitinmate nneed to a single
identification number to tie together the various parts of people's
information. Banks and insurance companies have a need to be able to
gather the complete record for a person for giving credit or giving
out payments.


you are making two erroneous assumptions; the first, is that
the SSN is guaranteed to be unique, it is not. That fact
has been widely documented and discussed. The second is
that banks and insurances and such need a unique *common*
identification, this is flat wrong; your bank has no legitimate
reasons to cross reference your banking info with, say, your
health care info, or the list of phone calls you made; it is none
of their business;

the problem is both the use and abuse of this number and the
fact that all the entities to whom you entrust your personal
information make no effort to keep it private, and worst,
actively trade and/or exchange it; this fact with the ability
to cross reference information -- not always correctly, the
SSN being a lousy identifier -- is what creates the problem.

It might not have been as much of a problem at a time when
large scale data mining was not as easy as today, but it is
becoming scary. If you are amongst the folks who complacently
think that they have nothing to hide therefore what is all
this fuss about, you do not deserve the freedom you are
currently enjoying (not for long though as things are evolving)

Your bank wants a unique number to identify their client? sure,
let them have their own system; so does your insurance, and
phone companies, etc. I have no problem with that, so long
as each have their own separate system. Besides their is
perfectly good enough means of identifying yourself as far
as commercial or other companies are concerned: your name.

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

As far as other points you made, for example, your bank has a valid need
to know if you have had your credit card revoked from another bank due
to non payment before issuing you a credit card. If there is not a way
for them to determine this then they must charge everyone enough to
build in a reserve to deal with those who won't pay their bill. You
could make a argument that banks could have a common identifier and
medical could have a different one as well as insurance having a third
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.

As far as SSN not being unique, the system was designed to have it be
unique, if it broke down then fix it. 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. All
the hits talked about the SSN being hijacked by other people. That is
not the fault of the identifier. As I said in my post you could augment
the identifier with a biometric identifier that would prove that it was
you. The issue here is not that identifier is not good, it's the data
that is assigned to that account number is bad. If you want better data
then push for laws that make the data file available to the person in
question and force penalties on the reporting agency for miss filing or
error nous information. Oh I'm sorry that would be the Fair Credit
Reporting Act and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act as
reported on the FTC website.

I think you need to remove your tinfoil hat 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. Besides
if they really wanted the information for some reason all they would
have to do is use your address to get your records if they could get the
phone company to part with them at all. They don't need a SSN or any
other identification number your address would be enough.

I believe that privacy of individual information needs to be preserved
and enhanced but the way to do that is not by making it hard to
correctly match the info and the person it goes with but rather making
it illegal to do so and making the punishment severe enough that it
won't happen by accident. Those who don't care about the law will
always have ways of finding the information they want as the cost of
obtaining the information is often not important to them. The real key
is to make sure that the information is not left lying around because
there are no effective rules forbidding the release of private
information. A good example of this would be the laws regarding the
dumping of hazardous wastes. Yes, it still happens but now that
companies know they may be required to clean them up the companies who
play by the rules don't do it anymore and for those who still commit the
crimes there are programs in place to catch them.

It would be nice to go back to a world where everyone knew who you were
and all parties to a transaction could be positively identified by all
parties involved but that day is long gone and we need to find a way to
deal with it so we can preserve the best of the old ways and still gain
the benefits of a large world filled with computers that record some
much of our lives.