> In America, you don't give your SSN to your utility company You do where I am, because they run a credit check to determine whether you need to pay a deposit

> In America, you don't give your SSN to your utility company You do where I am, because they run a credit check to determine whether you need to pay a deposit. Legally is not supposed to be used for identity at all, except for Social Security (and IRS) purposes. But in practice that doesn't happen and it's not particularly secret. Used to be pretty common for people to include it on their pre-printed checks. When I was in college it was used as the student ID number. This was all before "identity theft" was really a thing people worried about.