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This is why "hiding" one's social security number is a futile effort - it's already out there ... privacy policies are a sham - all those opt-out letters financial institutions send out are basically meaningless, since they are still legally free to share the information anyways with their other business units, which themselves can share them - one gets the idea ... it's akin to how the U.S. legally spys on American citizens by using an intermedary country, such as the UK to do the spying and then ship the info back ... point is that privacy leaves much to be desired and incidents like this are going to increasingly occur ... like no kidding ... but here's the scary part that few are talking about ...
BIOMETRICS ... just wait until banks, etc require customers to provide fingerprints, iris scans, etc ... it's scary not only due to the "1984" feel of it all, but more apty because biometric data CAN NOT BE REVOKED ... something one should keep in mind before giving out their thumb print, iris scan, etc to their bank or whatever - once biometric information is stolen, one is permanently screwed for it can't be reissued.
And to really digress, biometric information, ironically, may someday be shown not to be as secure as originally thought - there already exist various methods of duplicating *latent* fingerprints to fool scanners, iris scans can be fooled with contacts, dna can be altered/not as unique as people are led to believe, etc ...
In a nutshell, there needs to be serious civil and even criminal penalties for poor data management practices; collect less information from people to begin with - less information means less that can be lost ... I suppose that's wishful thinking, but then again I digress ... well, I'm off to the bank LOL!
Ron
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Domagon - Website Management and Domain Name Sales
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