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While I don't disagree with you on how bad things are now, good luck with the idea of not giving your SSN to your employer or university. At a certain point peo
by walrus01 6y ago
While I don't disagree with you on how bad things are now, good luck with the idea of not giving your SSN to your employer or university. At a certain point people will ask if your intention is to move to a wood shack in Montana and write a manifesto.
- nightowl_games 6y agoCome a few hundred clicks north to Saskatchewan where wood shacks and manifestos are something of a local past-time.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoIf they have high-speed fiber, it’s a date!
- renewiltord 6y agoSorry to disappoint.
- Sander_Marechal 6y agoThat's why StarLink is a thing!
- nightowl_games 6y agoI have high speed fiber to the home. SaskTel Infinet is great. It's a socialist organization too! Check it out! Saskatchewan has a lot of socialism in its history, mostly because of the intense agriculture history where farmers would pool all their grain together to negotiate better prices.
- swiley 6y agoIt's honestly pretty tempting but the border is closed.
- mulmen 6y agoGiving my SSN to my employer seems reasonable because that’s how I pay in to social security. SSNs are fine as IDs (with time bound assumptions), the problem is using them for authentication.
- d4mi3n 6y agoThey are in fact not great IDs and the Social Security Administration asked very nicely for the rest of the country to not use them as a form of identification: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus A few reasons why SSNs are bad as IDs: 1. There are a number of situations where people will not have a SSN. 2. SSNs are "secrets" that need to be broadly shared to participate in many parts of business and government in the US. 3. SSNs lack many security and authentication mechanisms most forms of ID have (e.g. photo ID) There are folks in the US who rally against the idea of a national ID, but I've always thought it was a silly argument considering how pervasive and problematic SSNs are as a form of identification.
- hedora 6y ago4. SSN’s are not unique, nor were they designed to be, but people think they are.
- mulmen 6y agoIf a living person has a SSN they can be identified by it [1]. That does not imply any individual can be identified by a SSN or that any SSN identifies an individual. The suitability of an SSN is situational for ID purposes. The video conflates identification and authentication to its detriment. Social Security Numbers are very good identifiers, that’s literally their purpose. Social Security Cards are poor authentication tokens because they contain no validation to prove the card holder is the person associated with the number. Or said another way, you cannot prove your identity (authenticate) with a social security card. I don’t see what built in validation of the number has to do with the security of the identifier. So again, the problem is using a Social Security Number or card for authentication. It’s fine as an identifier. [1]: Social Security Numbers can be reissued but this should only happen when the number is no longer in use.
- sneak 6y agoSet up a corporation, employ yourself, and send invoices from the corporation to the people who wish you to perform services for them. I've been doing this for over a dozen years. My customers don't need to have a single piece of my PII. To be honest, the thought of sending even a single piece of my PII to a customer or vendor gives me the heebie-jeebies, given what we know about data breaches. I don't even let my personal services people handle my data in Google Apps until and unless I've shipped them a chromebook and walked them through setting up hardware 2FA and enabling Advanced Protection. I'm waiting for a national bank chain or AmEx to get popped; thanks to the legally mandated total lack of financial privacy in the United States there's no way to insulate oneself from those vendors.