Three Years in Identity Theft Hell
Counterintuitively, this is evidence that the Equifax breach isn't necessarily going to cause massive harm. If someone wanted to impersonate you, they could already.<p>I remain hopeful that the full list of 140M SSNs will be posted in full. It's a rare opportunity: if that happens, the US will have no choice but to finally switch to a new system. One that doesn't rely on SSNs being private. That's the absurdity. It is easy to steal your identity because we have allowed it to be easy.<p>It's going to be difficult to switch to a new system, but the pain will be worth it. Imagine if the author could finally have peace of mind because nobody could impersonate him.<p>That is a fairytale, admittedly. It's always going to be possible to steal someone's identity if you're determined. But just look how trivial it is right now. Your driver's license plus the thief's photo is all they need. And it's possible to forge: they don't even need to swipe your physical one.<p><i>Those are “the keys to the kingdom,” said Bo Holland, CEO of AllClear ID, an identity-monitoring service. “Once you have somebody's name, social, birth date, and address, you can go and open new accounts.”</i><p>The SSN shouldn't be the critical key in that list.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus</a>