Who are you?

According to a 1996 nationwide poll conducted by Louis Harris & Associates, one in four Americans (24%) has "personally experienced a privacy invasion"-up from 19% in 1978. In 1995, the same survey found that 80% of Americans felt that "consumers have lost all control over how personal information about them is circulated and used by companies."

Ironically, both the 1995 and 1996 surveys were paid for by Equifax, a company that earns nearly two billion dollars each year from collecting and distributing personal information.

Those were the days

The 1970's were a good decade for privacy protection and consumer rights. In 1970, Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Elliot Richardson, who at time was President Nixon's secretary of health, education, and welfare (HEW), created a commission in 1973 to study the impact of computers on privacy. After years of testimony in Congress, the commission found all the more reason for alarm and issued a landmark report in 1973.

The most important contribution of the Richardson report was a bill of rights for the computer age, which is called the Code of Fair Information Practices ... That Code remains the most significant American thinking on the topic of computers and privacy to this day.

Code Of Fair Information Practices

The Code of Fair Information Practices is based on five principles:

There must be no personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret.

There must be a way for a person to find out what information about the person is in a record and how it is used.

There must be a way for a person to prevent information about the person that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without the person's consent.

There must be a way for a person to correct or amend a record of indentifiable information about the person.

Any organization creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuses of the data.

Badges? Identification

Early into this process, some statisticians realized that the Social Security number was a bad choice for a national identifier. The first problem was the number itself: with just nine digits, the SSN simply wasn't long enough to handle every citizen, every visitor to the country, and every resident alien through the end of the twenty-first century. Because the Social Security number is so small, any randomly chosen nine-digit number has a good chance of being a valid SSN, raising the possibility of fraud and tax evasion. Another problem with the SSN is the way the number is assigned. Instead of assigning the number in a uniform manner at birth, the way many European nations do, SSNs are assigned when a letter is sent to the Social Security Administration. As a result, different people are issued SSNs at different times, and many citizens don't have a SSN at all! Lastly, the SSN lacks whats called a check digit-a digit that doesn't actually store information, but verifies that the other digits are correct. Without a check digit, theres no way to detect swapped digits or mistyped numbers. All of these problems only increase the amount of invalid information that will be stored in databanks using SSNs for identifiers. These factors made the United States Social Security number a singularly bad choice for any type of identification-even the original purpose of tabulating Social Security retirement and survivor benefits.

Somewhat interestingly, almost ironically, improvement on the SSN ended up being rejected.

But the country didn't want a uniform national number that was well-designed and properly administered. Wrote Columbia University professor Alan Westin in 1967.

The idea was denounced in 1949 and 1950 in many newspapers as a potentially regimenting "police state" measure, and angry cartoons raised the "Big Brother" argument. The opposition was sufficiently strong to persuade twenty-four states to reject participation in the plan and to cause Congress to drop legislative proposals that had been put forward to provide for federal participation in the program.

An example of a number with a check digit would be the ISBN numbers from books. The following simple form allows you to enter the first 9 numbers of a ISBN number and it will calculate the last check digit. If the first 9 digits are entered correctly the calculated digit should match, if there are any changes in the first 9 digits, the theory is, then the check digit should be altered as well.

ISBN Calculation

Driver's License numbers