[SauciestGNU]

I'd say even invisible ink is taking the analogy too far. It's like the government published a newsletter, printed the PII on the back of the paper, and now wants to prosecute the first person to look at the back of the page.

[lkxijlewlf]

I commented below that I think it is like opening a CSV in notepad++ vs Excel. Same data, Excel just hides the commas. The commas are still there, though!

[jrockway]

Yeah, that's fair. Comments are a little bit like invisible ink; they look like they're not there because the rendering engine doesn't display them, but they're still sent with every copy of the information.

It would be better if the SSNs were white text on a white background and we were here because someone highlighted the text, though.