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by reaperducer 1295 days ago
Assume your name, phone, email, address are all public.

Someone on HN will invariably point out that this is how it was for the last hundred years, and it was only when we made computers powerful enough to abuse the information that this level of privacy became a concern.

I remember the days when your name, address, and phone number were public information. I paid something like $15/month to keep it out of the phone book.

What I recently learned, browsing through old books that a local library was throwing away, is that sometimes those phone book listings would also include things like a woman's maiden name, and the name of her husband, and/or marital status. Something like:

  Smith, Margaret C (nee Jones, widow of George): 202-555-1212
That part was new to me.
1 comments

In Sweden almost everything about you is public information. Your address, social security number, tax records, criminal record etc.
To be honest, that's close to how it should be in an ideal world. But US companies went down the obviously-moronic path of treating social security numbers as passwords and now we're stuck.

Eventually the bulk of the world will probably end up with some sort of government-managed crypto-ID, but it's sure going to take the US a long time to get there.

Out of curiosity: does this lead to more identity theft (or misuse)?
I live in Norway, which has a similar system, so I can’t answer for op, but the answer here is, no. Your “social security number” is not ever used as a password or other form of presumably secret key. While you probably don’t go blabbing it everywhere, there’s not much you can do if you know mine. You would also have to physically steal my phone and also learn my secret pin, or break into my fire safe in order to successfully use my personal number for anything. Address and phone number are the same thing, that’s just where you mail things to, it’s not used as a secret key.
I live in France and while we do not have public records (or just a very few), we do not have identifiers that can be easily used to do something nefarious. Our social security number, or the tax one is not used anywhere as a secure identifier (as opposed to, say, US with their SS# that is tragically comical).

We do like secrecy, though, and opening up the tax reports and addresses would be a 12 on the Richter scale of earthquakes. I do not know whether that would be good or bad but it would lead to all sorts of social unrest.

No, instead they use this radical method called actually identifying the person they're about to give a bunch of cash to instead of trying to pretend a username is a password.
Sorry, I did not understand your comment (English is not my first language)
Gp is saying that no, it doesn't increase identity theft. Other (better) methods of verification are used instead.