I’m pretty sure mine has been stolen a dozen times at this point. You should never assume your SSN is private information, but you should treat it as such to limit how many people have it.
The main issues here are:
- applications for credit - freeze your credit at the major credit bureaus - Experian, Equifax, Transunion (bonus points for ARS and SageStream); make sure to unfreeze if you apply for a credit card or bank account though
- impersonating - like applying for jobs and whatnot; this shouldn’t directly impact you, and it’s on the employer to make sure they know who they’re employing
- password resets - the best you can do is use MFA, though many services will allow resets with just personal information; I hope this changes, and some orgs are doing things to prevent abuse (e.g. Fidelity has voice recognition to cut down on support scams)
Honestly, we really need to stop using the SSN as identification.
And it even says so right on the card. 🤦🏼♂️
Wait, is the SSN used to verify a person’s identity?
Why would a static key ever be used like that?
It’s not supposed to for anything but government. And it’s not a key, it’s an ID number. Not sure how else other than static you could do that.
It’s also not supposed to be used for anything, but government (specifically, Social Security), and it even says so on the card.
Yet pretty much everyone uses it for identification:
- apply for a credit card - SSN
- apply for a bank account - SSN
- apply for a job - SSN
- get a mortgage - SSN
Basically, any time an org needs to prove you are who you say you are, they’ll ask for state-issued ID and your SSN. Every time. Sometimes they’ll even want a copy of your SSN card, which is extremely stupid.
The SSN should only be used for SS benefits. If we want a federal ID, we should make a federal ID system based on challenge/response.
I’m up in Canada and we have the same problem with SSN … as a kid one of my uncles told me that the SSN is only for government use and nothing else … he explained that even banks shouldn’t ask for it as it is not required. He helped me set up my first bank account when I was 15 and he insisted and fought with the bank branch that SSN were not required. After a bit of back and forth, they finally agreed and I got my first bank account … which I’ve kept ever since over 30 years ago. And in all that time, I’ve protected my SSN from banks and credit services. Because I was able to start that first account, I could start new ones and grow from there.
Best part was … about ten years after that, I got my first Credit Card and the form the bank gave asked me to verify my information … INCLUDING MY FULL SSN WHICH THEY HAD IN THEIR RECORDS.
The privacy and security of these dumb SSN cards and numbers is a joke.
Because the US doesn’t have a federal identification card. At the state level you can use the id number of someone’s drivers license or state id for identifying them, which is marginally better since it changes with new id cards.
SSNs weren’t intended to be used for identification, but since there’s no other national option they effectively are.
SSN as identification
Laughing in EU
Eh, there are good parts to it as well. The only Federal ID I have is my passport, so there’s no reason for them to track me across state lines. If I get pulled over in Oregon, they don’t necessarily know my driving history in California or Nevada, so I’m more likely to get a warning than a ticket. If I had a Federal ID, they’d probably communicate across state lines more.
It’s mostly bad, but with a silver lining.
I’m more likely to get a warning than a ticket
How about driving reaponsibly instead?
I mean, I do. I’ve had three tickets over my entire driving career, each in a different state, and nothing in the last 10 years. I’ve also never been in an accident.
But I’ve been pulled over something like 10 times total for various reasons (registration expired, headlight out, speeding), and because I’m a responsible driver (no infractions or warnings in the prior year or two), I generally get warnings. If warnings were national, one or two of those might have turned into a ticket, and those would probably be fightable in court (but I’m not going to travel hundreds of miles to fight a $100 fine).
How about understanding what an example is?
To further protect yourself, you can also:
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Formally request that large transactions through your bank be done with you present, in person. Ask if you can set a limit and only if done in person also temporarily lift that limit.
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Obtain a credit card. Either you fight to get your money back when fraud hits, or they fight to get their money back. You can guess which team is better staffed. I was procrastinating for ages getting one myself. Then another fraudulent transaction hit. Despite having a fair amount of knowledge in this realm and doing a solid amount of research independently AND reporting it immediately, it still took days to get money actually placed back into my account. AND THEN IT HAPPENED AGAIN with a brand new card within 30 days. Likely the shitty auto update service large organizations can subscribe to, or I got unlucky on a brute force attempt. Either way, a CC will save you this hassle.
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Bitwarden.
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Passwords only on your phone. No biometrics without a backup plan.
Yeah, I only use credit cards or cash these days, and leave my debit cards frozen/locked. The only time I would need my debit card is to use an ATM, and it’s easy enough to login on my phone and unlock it. I’ve had several fraudulent charges on various cards, and so far it has been resolved with a short phone call and a reissue, and my replacements seem to come faster than new credit cards. The rewards are nice, but the purchase protections are the real reason I use them.
biometrics
Biometrics are really nice, and on newer phones, way more secure than a PIN. They’re also local-only, so they’re quite privacy-friendly.
But absolutely have a backup. I use a long PIN as my backup, and my bank lets me use a long PIN on my debit card as well, so I keep them the same (easier to remember that way). I use my fingerprint for pretty much everything, but I also have my phone reboot itself after a period of inactivity, which forces a PIN login (again, helps me remember it). Oh, and it’s a random PIN, so not something anyone could guess (I’m a developer, so I used a small Python script:
import random; ''.join(str(random.randint(9)) for _ in range(N))where N is your desired length). I ran three of those and picked one.And yeah, Bitwarden is fantastic. I apparently have >300 logins, and there’s no way I’d be able to remember that many unique passwords.
I got a NEW credit card faster than my bank was able to reissue and send me a replacement debit/credit. By like half the time.
I wasn’t aware biometrics were more secure. My info is clearly out of date! Though I was also thinking of the forced unlocking of phones by, er…other people.
Police. I’m talking about the popo.
Good old Tasker should be able to handle the bulk of automating things like an auto-shutdown. Might still need to insert custom code BUT they have a community. A couple searches and verification that you’re not being a dumbass and downloading something malicious and wham bam easy - or manually type it out. I dunno. Don’t be big dumb.
Tasker ain’t obsolete yet, dammit!
Remember, folks! NONE OF THIS MATTERS IF YOU GIVE UP YOUR CREDENTIALS JUST CAUSE SOMEONE CALLED AND SAID GRANDMA WAS INJURED IN A MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT.
biometrics
Here’s a Naomi Brockwell video about it. I also used to avoid it, but that video changed my mind. I can easily turn off the biometrics if I’m going somewhere where LE might force me to unlock it (e.g. travel), but I can just mis-scan it a few times and it’ll force me to enter the PIN anyway.
Tasker
Yeah, that can work, but GrapheneOS at least has an automatic reboot option after so much time has passed w/o being used. I set mine to 4 hours so it’ll reboot at night, but I make it a lot less when I’m traveling. Everything is encrypted on a fresh boot and calls still work (emergency outgoing, and any incoming), so it’s a really nice bit of extra security for lazy people like me.
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Take your social security number. Change the last number by one. Congrats, you have stolen someones number.
It isn’t secure or random in any way. Infact, by doing the above you will have the number of a person born probably in the same hospital as you.
Isn’t it the address being leaked with it that makes this notable?
You can’t add a number to a SSN and also add a number to the street address to then narrow down which full names are associated with that SSN to then possibly be able to use it.
I didn’t think the number had any use on its own
The address does make it a lot more useful, but the point that I am making is simply that the number itself has never been secure, and this kinda failure was inevitable due to only needing slightly more info than the number itself. A number which itself is already partially identifying.
We shouldn’t use social security numbers like we do.
I mean it says right on the fucking card not to .
But some institutions insist.
Sure it shouldn’t be used like this. But incrementing a number isn’t enough to steal someone’s identity.
Is usa numbering just incremental? Canadian ones use a checksum type setup to determine if it is a valid SIN
There’s some brackets based on area and similar https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html
First 3 digits are the area number assigned to a geographic. Next 2 are a group number and are not used serially but have a rather unusual usage sequence. The last 4 are a serial number assigned in order.
That’s not true anymore. My kids have very different SSNs.
Are your kids twins?
No, but born in the same city. They don’t have a common prefix or anything like that.
Yeah, the SSN system is the stupidest freaking thing ever for all the crap we use it for. but trying to implement a better system is met with cries of “GOVERNMENT OVERREACH, COMMUNISTS! OH GOD IN HEAVEN, MUH RIGHTS!!!1!”. So…we haven’t really done anything about it, and probably won’t in my lifetime.
It’s unfortunate that SSN has come to be used as a form of proof of existence as a person, but I’m glad at least that more effective means of formally tracking and quantifying us have been successfully fought back. Banks, governments, service providers and employers having some friction and uncertainty in whether their database entry accurately corresponds to you is itself a valuable form of privacy.
I’ve been reading the book Seeing Like A State and I think it has some pretty good points about how civic legibility and record keeping is established as a tool of centralized control and can be a dangerous double edged sword.
Any tool that is misused can be harmful, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. It just means you should regulate how it’s used.
The tool is not the problem, the user is.
Well, partly. For instance you might be able to approach the problem of gun violence with a culture of responsible gun use. But it could also reduce violence if you got rid of the guns. The problem happens when multiple conditions are satisfied; both that the tool is available and that people are going to misuse it.
To quote an excerpt from the book I mentioned:
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The other elements being “high-modernist ideology”, an authoritarian state, and “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”.
The problem is that, like with the guns example, “regulating how it’s used” and avoiding all that stuff is a really precarious and difficult problem, and failure seems very likely, especially given the state of the US right now. For dangerous tools like effective identification schemes, I think favoring the added safety of resisting them is a legitimate choice when you can’t really trust the people who would be able to use them.
Why do those numbers even exist? In my country we got ID cards and passports, plus some tax identifier that is used for social security and tax payments by our employer into the accounts, and that’s that. All that’s required for actual identification is a valid ID (including passport as long as you have a recent address registration). Their numbers change every 10 years, or you could apply to have it replaced earlier.
SSN isn’t even meant to be used to verify identity, really. It’s just supposed to be used to track people paying into the social security system. Somehow it got tied up in identity verification even though all it is is some essentially random number.
They aren’t secret and never were meant to be. If you can’t change it (biometrics, ssn, etc) it’s not a password.
bruh
Can’t wait until it leaks into the public
Already has…
Maybe we should use something better for identity, geez.
There was another post or comment about this topic and a person posted a list of websites to freeze your credit. Does anyone know where that comment went?
Might be worth investing in a credit monitoring service. I use aura, it was definitely the simplest way to freeze each one from the same portal. I also use their call filtering service so any unknown number that calls me gets silenced before my phone rings and a message says, “I’m a spam filter, please state the nature of the call.” It’s saved me so much goddamn looking at who’s calling.
On top of that, gives me alerts, credit scores on the regular so I can notice if anything is up, it’s been systematically requesting takedowns of all my info on those data broker sites…other shit too, honestly. I forget. But it’s definitely made my life much more pleasant.
