Enjoy your i(dentityTheft)Phone

[mdlbear]

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.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I know it's nothing new. But being able to use someone else's SSN and have it just go through is scarier than average. And it's a danger you can't avoid by not using an iPhone; it sounds as if someone could just guess numbers till one works.

Personally, I use a Tracfone, which doesn't require any information at all from me.

[mithriltabby]

The thing we need to drill through a great number of heads is that identification is not authentication. There’s nothing wrong with having a nine-digit number to identify one’s self, but there needs to be more than that to verify that you’re the person associated with that number.

[mdlbear]

I wish I could believe there was a good way of explaining that to a politician.

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.