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He also explains why US citizens don't have an Identity Card as opposed to many European countries.
I'm not a big fan of over-regulating, but this is a specific issue that requires a significantly heavier hand then "i'm going to another bank" as they are all as bad as eachother.
Coming from another country I really have difficulties understanding why e.g., utilities would want to have your SSN. What do they get that they otherwise won’t get? Isn’t a validated address and a credit card number enough for them? What is the scenario that they try to protect against? That someone misses his 30 USD utility payment and has a CC that is not covered? That seems like a rather weak argument
These credit information don't give much benefit to Americans, it gives benefits to businesses[1]. It's essentially just a global black list where business can communicate who not to do business with.
This business is there for other businesses and we are the product there. This is why people generally have very shitty experience when they have to interact with them, and this is why Equifax thinks the problem is solved when they provide free one year credit monitoring service.
[1] note how Equifax thought it was important notice that the core database - the one storing your credit records was not affected. None of Americans care about this, but if the core database storing record was compromised Equifax would disappear overnight without any help of the government, because none of the businesses would want to use it.
"We need laws that limit the collection and use of SSNs." The problem shouldn't be defined as "let's still keep SSN secret, but limit its collection", because sooner or later your SSN will leak. The issue is that SSN number shouldn't be considered as secret and some other measures should be used to identify the person.
Anything collected will eventually leak. The issue is that companies shouldn't be collecting ANYTHING , and what they do collect should get purged ASAP. The problem is that every company got addicted to collecting information and nobody made them pay the price for doing so.
The real crisis here is that Equifax isn't being held responsible for providing meaningful fraud protection beyond one year. When I lived in the UK, the banks were constantly trying to sell me "fraud protection" and "identity protection" - trying to argue with the salesdrones about why you think it is insane that they are trying to sell me protection against their own shoddy information security practices was useless…
Neither of those companies provides anything valuable to ordinary citizens and the data collection they do comes with great price to us as it shown with recent Equifax fiasco.
I never realised till now that American's SSNs were supposed to be kept secret. That's absolutely ridiculous. The idea of trying to keep the UK equivalent (National Insurance Number) secret is laughable. How can anything function when an important id number is also supposed to be known by very few people?
I've now discovered that my details are in this leak.
Does anyone have any advice for how a non-US citizen, not currently living in the USA, can secure their data and ensure that its not being used nefariously? I.e. is there a way to permanently retire a SSN and credit rating, remotely (which doesn't involve dying, lol)?
I think we're mixing two different purposes here. Authentication through knowledge of a SSN is an absurd practice, and is a non problem in countries which have a national ID card scheme. Introducing ID cards would be my obvious response to this leak. Not re-issuing SSN until the next major leak. Having a universal unique identifier for every individual across systems is a different matter and I am not convinced this…