what's the harm of letting them use that to link you to all your digital phone communications?

Of that's right, don't even need that, an email will do.

Post yours.

I wasn't sure whether to give it out to some Nigerian fellows who I'm helping out - their uncle died and left a #%*^load of money in the bank... Long story.

Anyway, now I can proceed to help them out, and make a little something for myself.

I doubt that those scammers even know what an SSN is.

That scam is really about persuading people to send anything from a couple of hundred to thousands of dollars to them, via Western Union, to pay some of the incidental expenses of the transference of several million (imaginary) dollars abroad, with you getting something like a 20% or 30% share of the millions. When the only obstacle to you receiving 20% of $12.2 million is a "drug clearance certificate" that can supposedly be obtained for $3600 (payable in advance) what's not to love?

Use any of the following that begin with 000 or 666. Also from 900 to 999 if 2 digits after are not between 70-88.

A SSN is not valid if it is 999-00-9999 or 999-99-0000 where the 9's represent other digits and the 0's represent the actual number 0.

The following have been retired due to commercial use by companies.
078-05-1120 -- They had to retire it because 5,755 used it back in the 40's.
219-09-9999 --

I can't rest easy knowing, for a nominal fee, I can bring them peace!

And everybody in Nigeria has my email address.

if your social falls into the wrong hands you will become the victim of identity theft, or some other act you may not appreciate. Over many years I found out all kinds of information from ss...employer, dob, residence address, creditors, payment histories and others..Sometimes I would get the number out of trash or marriage license applications..always was completely legal in my case, but if you believe criminals don't like having valid ss numbers of good credit scores then you should just post yours now..

I can make up any SS number, but without a legitimate name and address to match it up to they're just numbers.

Go ahead and steal 302-54-7698. Buy yourself a big screen TV on 'ol JohnnyRingo. hahaha

could get your name, address, date of birth, employer, credit score, individual creditors...etc. If for instance you are driving a nicer car, living in a reasonably nice neighborhood, or show other indicators of good credit and good income, you are subject to victimization. Unless of coarse you like to pretend all of the stories of identity theft are false, or maybe that the victim had it coming for letting their personal information out..no, the only people making the ridiculous argument in this thread are people who have never been victimized.

It would be disastrous to give away your SS number to everyone, but it does not contain any personal information. It is, however, directly correlated with your personal information.

The OP is a caution against NSA claims that some program or another doesn't collect any personal information because it just collects information that would be personal if you looked it up, but that is not personal intrinsically.

A phone number, for instance, doesn't tell you much about the user. It is just a string of numbers. But it can be used to discover all sorts of things about the user, and it would be a stretch to say it isn't personal information.

I say borrowed because someone was just using my name and SS to get employment.

I had to reinstate my license 10 years or so ago, and when I was talking to the person at the counter, he asked what I was doing in Austin Texas. Of course I was never there and I was quite concerned.

He told me someone there got a Texas drivers license on my SS number, but that it wasn't a big deal and not to worry. He advised I watch for unusual credit card communications, but that likely wouldn't happen. Obviously it was an undocumented worker who was even paying into my FICA taxes. Nothing ever came of it, and my credit is fully intact.

So yes, I absolutely do believe in identity theft, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be paying for someone's new 24 foot Bayliner like so many fear. In order to buy things and hurl me into debt, the thief would have to establish a physical address where police can arrest them when the CC company figures out what happened, and that's more than unlikely.

I suppose a thief can go to all the trouble of researching me, taking my SS number and name, then after applying for and getting credit cards (a very tough feat in itself these days), then running up a huge phone bill on the College Girls Hotline, but I'm not responsible for their gullibility and I'm not going to pay for it. If they try to damage my credit for their incompetence, I'll sue.

That dumbass from LifeLock drives around with his SS# in big block letters on the side of a box truck, not just because LifeLock protects his ID, but because it isn't as big a problem as he'd like to frighten people into believing. If any schmo with $50 could steal your ID, the entire credit card system would have crashed & burned years ago.

Interesting point though.

Your social is tied to lots of different information obtainable by many different entities.

compile those ss occurrences into lists revealing much, much more info about you than knowledge of any one could. Some operate perfectly legally, others are less careful with the release of that info. In either case any licensed private investigator in any state can send a copy of their license to these places, pay them $50 to $500, and get everything someone with criminal intent would need to destroy you financially. I have been in rooms full of licensed investigators and was fairly reluctant for some of them to know my last name.

A lot of people LIE about their job history to bullshit their way into a good paying job.

The 1% would LOVE to gain access to that info as part of creating a caste system. Many employers look at a stack of applications and all they care about is prior job history. Think about it. Who will take less? Someone who's single in an apartment or married with three kids in college and a mortgage? Hell, there are bosses who think, "This guy has never made good money so why should I be the one to give it to him?" Then they underpay the poor slob for as long as he's stupid enough to accept it.

The 666-XX-XXXX and 9XX-XX-XXXX blocks are reserved.

contains a huge amount of data, and it is all public information. With it, the police know what I look like, my birth date, whether or not I am licensed to drive a car, whether or not my car is insured, the courts know whether or not I need to pay child support (which is removed automatically if need be), where I live, who I am married to or living with, whether or not I am able to vote, oh yes, whether or not I own guns and what type, in addition to any number of other things.

In the US, you are the gate keeper of your information. With minor effort, anyone can steal your identity, with or without your SSN. In Sweden, the bank is the gatekeeper of my bank account. I can access it online, using my Personnummer (530314-7754) and a little device called a digipass, essentially a random number generator linked to my account which i turn on using a 4 digit pin.

I would support a national ID for voting, the SSN is a perfect vehicle for a national ID. We just need to move the gate keeping function to the financial institutions.

I routinely ask for SSN's when people call to set up new accounts. They hesitate for about a half second, and since they figure they called me, they give it to me 99% of the time. If a person questions it, I simply ask for date of birth and driver license number instead, my company allows that.

I really thought when we went to that level of nosiness, more people would object. I guess a society that allows the TSA to grope and the NSA to spy doesn't really care about this.

Your SSN doesn't contain personal information. It is personal information.

Like, if there were some message board behind a million or so blind proxies so that nobody could connect it to me? Sure, just post it.

to exploit it...not because someone who is inclined couldn't exploit it if they wished to.

You need to have an identity to tie it to

have an identity..the number will provide that...I have worked cases of people using a fraudulent ss, we would find out who and where the ss actually belonged to, including contact information, sometimes they had a traceable connection to the person, sometimes they didn't..there is a reason identity thieves go to a lot of trouble to steal database info instead of random number generation. It costs money to get information, and it is fairly easy to get someone's actual number who has a better chance of return on investment.

For all I know, somebody's doing that right now. (The joke would be on them.)

prior to 1972, this was the state in which you applied for the card, which may indicate your birth state.
since then, it's based on the zip code of your residence when you applied.

http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html

ok, not very specific personal information, but it's NOT completely random.

I and my siblings were all born in different states, but have the same area code because we all got our SSN's at the same time through the same regional office.

None of us were born near that office and none of us currently live near that office.

in my case, it's neither the state in which I was born, nor the state in which I currently reside; but it is the state I grew up in.

anyway this is rather tangential -- as discussed, the social security number is a key to considerable information usually once regarded as private, but these days, according to the nsa, perhaps not so much. and I see your point that a slippery politician could make highly misleading statements by talking about the number rather than the vault of information it unlocks.