That's purely incidental, though. There is no hard choice betweeen "all your data has to be public" and "you can be totally screwed by identity theft if your pr

That's purely incidental, though. There is no hard choice betweeen "all your data has to be public" and "you can be totally screwed by identity theft if your private data is leaked". The US system could be fixed much more efficiently by putting the burden of proof on the businesses who made the transaction instead of the individuals whose data got stolen (gave someone a loan who gave you a stolen SSN? better find out who you really gave it to).