Enjoy your i(dentityTheft)Phone
2007-07-05 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
From The Blog of M'Gath we get a link to this article by Michael Tiemann decrying the fact that AT&T wants your SSN so they can do a credit check before they activate your iPhone. I hate to tell you, folks: this is nothing new. They've been requiring a SSN to set up an account for as long as I can remember.
We have a national ID -- we've had it for half a century or more. It sucks, but I don't think it's practical to put that particular genie back in the bottle. The best we can do is patch the system so that identity theft isn't a simple matter of getting hold of a single number that's not all that hard to obtain.
No, I don't know how to do that.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 04:39 pm (UTC)Personally, I use a Tracfone, which doesn't require any information at all from me.
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Date: 2007-07-05 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-06 12:26 am (UTC)Actually, there are a number of privacy issues in having a single identifier that can be tracked across multiple organizations, but that's a different intractable problem.