301–310 of 472 posts
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A collection of facts is not and can not be copyrightable, especially when it was mechanically derived/collected (no human creativity). So, no, it is absolutely not "Equifax's IP".
Only in the US. In the EU and other jurisdictions is does have protection [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_...
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What can an attacker who knows your SSN still do with that information nowadays? Genuinely curious, as the SSN is just this strange in distinct password thingy the Europeans like me hear about on HN but have no actual parallels with.
If they have your address; birthday; and SSN a whole lot. Generally, they could apply for credit cards; loans; set something to bill to you; etc... Fortunately, it's getting harder without previous addresses or other verification methods. For non-Americans that don't know, our Social Security number is generally assigned at birth or when you become a citizen by the Social Security Administration. Social Security is a…
Are there any ways to check the breach to see if my information is there, other than downloading it myself? I’m not sure of the legality of doing so.
There is a free service call Have I Been Pwned which uses your email address to see what data breaches you are part of ( https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ). While it uses your email to check (not SSN) odds are if they have your SSN in the dataset they also have your email.
> The problem with verifying breaches sourced from data aggregators is that nobody willingly - knowingly - provides their data to them This is a bit of a tangent but I feel like if we can prove this statement then these data aggregators should be made illegal. How can you consent to something that you don’t know you’re consenting to? Likewise why do these entities have the right to collect detailed personal informati…
I have been using a different site@mydomain email address for every service I've used for the past 15 years. I can point to exactly which site breach furnished my email address to the aggregators.
Can't the SSA just issue 330 million new social security numbers, and tell people to be more careful with them from this point forward?
The SSA specifically told people not to misuse SSNs this way and it seems like a poor use of taxpayer funding to spend billions bailing out businesses’ bad decisions, even if that was legal (Congress would have to specifically authorize it), since we’d be back to the same problem with five years. If we were going to do something, we’d make government ID include an NFC token for PKI purposes since public keys can’t be…
Another alternative would be to go the other way: Pass a law prohibiting the use of social security numbers for any purpose other than social security. Don't provide any globally unique identifier for companies to use.
Instead each institution would issue their own identifier which would have no value outside of that institution. If they get breached or you lose your ID, they mail a new one to the address they have on file or some similar recovery method and you don't have to worry about someone using your ID somewhere else because the breached one gets disabled and you get a replacement.
The obvious advantage here is that companies can't use it to correlate your activity across institutions without your knowledge or consent.
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The SSA specifically told people not to misuse SSNs this way and it seems like a poor use of taxpayer funding to spend billions bailing out businesses’ bad decisions, even if that was legal (Congress would have to specifically authorize it), since we’d be back to the same problem with five years. If we were going to do something, we’d make government ID include an NFC token for PKI purposes since public keys can’t be…
> If we were going to do something, we’d make government ID include an NFC token for PKI purposes since public keys can’t be compromised in the same way, but nobody is jumping to pay for that, especially in a country where you have so many people prone to wild conspiracy theories (I am especially amazed by the guys who freak about a national ID as big brother but never say a word about the credit reporting industry)…
You do not want to make it easier for every carnivorous for-profit corporation and wannabe apparatchik to pressure every citizen to cough up an identifier that can be used to track their every move.
I am just dreading the day when a near simultaneous cyberattack on a high number of(more vulnerable like middle-lower income individuals) start in a DDoS fashion: 1. Credit histories will be(unlocked) used to file multiple credit applications and tax credits will be applied for. 2. Multiple Cell phones will be hijacked through Sim Hijacking or other zeroday attacks to make it very difficult to get back in. 3. A perso…
I wonder how many governments have this capability right now? I would guess at least three.
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> If we were going to do something, we’d make government ID include an NFC token for PKI purposes since public keys can’t be compromised in the same way, but nobody is jumping to pay for that, especially in a country where you have so many people prone to wild conspiracy theories (I am especially amazed by the guys who freak about a national ID as big brother but never say a word about the credit reporting industry)…
I still don't get why people are calling these "religious fears". The parable from the book is because the problem is very old, but the problem is exactly the same as it ever was: If a central authority gives everyone a serial number then it will be used to track them by powerful institutions, which is a tool of oppression. This is the massive mistake we made with social security numbers, and their inherent insecurit…
People are calling these "religious fears" because they are fears very often based on religion. People who fear the Mark of the Beast aren't simply worried about being tracked by powerful institutions, they're looking for prophetic signs of the antichrist and Satanic one world government that their holy book says will lead to the second coming of Christ and Armageddon. Even though it was really talking about Nero Caesar. You can't separate the fear from the religion.
>You do not want to make it easy for every rapacious for-profit corporation to pressure every citizen to cough up an identifier that can be used to track their every move.
Then ban cellphones. Those are far more useful as a means of surveillance and control than any serial number in a database. They're also held in the hand and to the head, and used to buy and sell goods, which conforms far more closely to the mark of the beast than, say, RFID chips or SSNs or serial numbers on currency. Which the mark of the beast people were all against, in their time.
Unless you want to go full Kaczynski and run off into the woods to live off the grid, you can't avoid having identifiers attached to you. Your birth certificate, vaccination history, criminal record, credit score, address and phone number, the license plate on your car. Even the cookie that leaves you logged in to Hacker News. Governments and corporations already know who you are and where you are. Are there massive negative externalities to having our identities controlled by forces we have no agency over? Absolutely. But fearing every number as a slippery slope to a global satanic dystopian hellscape isn't reasonable. Unfortunately that's the context in which many people have this conversation, and that needs to be recognized.
For non-Americans (and Americans) that don't quite understand what SSN is and why it's a problem, CGP Grey [1] has a great (and short) video about the history and why it's not technically an identifier, but has become one. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus
Not only an identifier, many places use it as a secret.