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U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

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Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

burkaman wrote: post #24
tczMUFlmoNk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. As a member of a generation that has grown up tacitly understanding that social security will very likely be insolvent/cancelled by the time that we're old enough to qualify for it, and thus we shouldn't rely on it whatsoever—it's surreal to consciously connect these two concepts. For me, "social security number" is just the name for the ID number that so many of us have and are used to writing everywhere. The n…

> social security will very likely be insolvent/cancelled by the time that we're old enough to qualify for it This is not true, it's propaganda promoted by rich people who want to get rid of social security. It could be eliminated for political reasons, but spreading this idea that it's going to "run out of money" only makes that more likely. The government cannot run out of its own money. It can cause inflation, but…

> This is not true, it's propaganda promoted by rich people who want to get rid of social security.

Exactly: “social security is going to be gone by the time you would get it” is a line peddled almost entirely by political activists looking to build support for eliminating social security, and it has been such a line for the entire life span of people who are now old enough to receive SS old age retirement benefits.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#32

Post by localplume »

jklinger410 wrote: post #12

I heard this on NPR and I appreciate the avenue by which the red flag is being raised, but it bothers the shit out of me, because EVERYONE'S personal data is being sold by online brokers. The implication that their data is more important or something just seems like a ploy to get more eyeballs on the research.

[dead]

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#33

Post by jjkeddo199 »

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier.

Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Violence isn't the only issue either -- Imagine what will happen when courts catch up to the internet age. Get ready for the normalization of digging through decades of comment history to character assassinate people on a whim. This is getting really bad. I don't think society at large is ready for the coming nightmare.

--

We need immediate privacy reforms to:

1. Fine companies for requiring unneeded personal data. Fine companies for collecting addresses and numbers when they don't need them. Address + number specifically should be dumped when no longer needed.

2. Fully regulate+audit data-based industries to confirm that anonymized user profiles are truly anonymous.

3. Raise the legal bar allowing usage of personal data to harm an individual. Lawyers and employers shouldn't be able to find+splice your Youtube comment history to try and character assassinate you outside of some felony-tier criminal case.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#34

Post by LtWorf »

kube-system wrote: post #15
LtWorf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is treating the SSN as a username and a password. It should not be the only information required to authenticate people.

The government doesn't do this though, it's mostly banks that are guilty.

The government should regulate the banks.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#35

Post by fusslo »

jjkeddo199 wrote: post #33

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

are explosives as easy to get as bullets & guns where you live?

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#36

Post by LtWorf »

stonogo wrote: post #10
LtWorf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is treating the SSN as a username and a password. It should not be the only information required to authenticate people.

The US military does not use the SSN as a username or a password. They've had smartcards, even on Linux, as far back as 20 years ago or more. Users without smartcards have to go through 2FA with a username/password combination and codes over SMS or proper TOTP (depending on agency). The problem is that the entire Department of Defense is still very much a paper-oriented organization, and they got rid of service numbe…

I wasn't talking about the military per se. I was talking about how you can open a bank account just by knowing someone else's ssn

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#37

Post by warner25 »

randombits0 wrote: post #13
jcadam wrote: post #3

I'm sure the military still has a SSN field on EVERY. SINGLE. FORM. they have you fill out while you're in the service. There was talk of replacing that with a "service number" but somehow I doubt they've got around to it yet. Between VA employees leaving laptops full of PII laying around and that big OPM leak several years ago, I apparently have no private life.

Chinese hackers stole over 70 million records of current/past military members from the Office of Management and Budget back in April of 2014.

I think you're thinking of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), not OMB (although I did just learn that the Trump administration proposed to merge parts of OPM into OMB).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_Person...

But yeah, compared to that, sadly, this acquisition of much less detailed information about 30,000 service members seems moot.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#38

Post by burkaman »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #29
burkaman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> social security will very likely be insolvent/cancelled by the time that we're old enough to qualify for it This is not true, it's propaganda promoted by rich people who want to get rid of social security. It could be eliminated for political reasons, but spreading this idea that it's going to "run out of money" only makes that more likely. The government cannot run out of its own money. It can cause inflation, but…

>The government cannot run out of its own money. It can cause inflation, but continuing to pay social security benefits is not going to suddenly cause massive inflation. Social security is a massive portion of federal spending, indefinitely printing money to fund it is not sustainable and will cause significant inflation

Why hasn't that happened yet? Also, the government is going to continue indefinitely printing money whether or not we have social security.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#39

Post by permo-w »

fusslo wrote: post #35
jjkeddo199 wrote: post #33

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

are explosives as easy to get as bullets & guns where you live?

explosives are a 10 minute youtube video away

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#40

Post by warner25 »

trvrsalom wrote: post #23
jcadam wrote: post #3

I'm sure the military still has a SSN field on EVERY. SINGLE. FORM. they have you fill out while you're in the service. There was talk of replacing that with a "service number" but somehow I doubt they've got around to it yet. Between VA employees leaving laptops full of PII laying around and that big OPM leak several years ago, I apparently have no private life.

There are DOD ID numbers, but they've updated the forms to just ask for both.

In my experience, though, people now freak out if you fill in the SSN field on the form, because that makes it PII with a bunch of requirements for proper storage and transmission. This is despite the fact that most of the other information on the form already makes it PII, regardless of the presence of a SSN.

It did take a few years in the mid-2010s for the forms to catch up and replace the SSN field with the DOD ID number. In 2021, I think I was supposed to get new ID tags (dog tags) that would have my DOD ID number instead of my SSN.

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