Over the next week or two, I’ll be moving to some new digs (actually 19th Century old digs, but new to me), and so I’ve been making the inevitable calls for service hookup. Yesterday afternoon, I called up Time Warner Cable and signed up for their cable internet service. Everything went fine until the end of the call, when the otherwise kind service representative moved to the following line in his McDonaldized script:
SERVICE REP: “Now I’ll just need your social security number…”
ME: “Um, no, you don’t need my social security number.”
SERVICE REP: “Well, yes, we do need your social security number…”
ME: “NO, you don’t need my social security number. You can’t have my social security number. I’ve already given you my name, my address and my phone number. With my social security number you can take out loans in my name, you can…”
SERVICE REP: “Look, I NEED your social security number. If I don’t have it in the system, I can’t set up an account for you today. The computer needs it to complete your request.”
ME: Pause. “All right then. I can’t give you my social security number, so I suppose I’ll have to set up internet access with another company. Thank you for your time. Good bye now…”
SERVICE REP: “Wait.” Pause. “If you just give me the last four digits of your social security number, we can go ahead.”
ME: Pause. “OK.”
This, I understand, is a pretty typical experience. Humungous corporations will insist to you that they NEED, really really NEED, your social security number in order to proceed with a transaction associated with an account. But they don’t really NEED your social security number. They WANT it, because with it, they can find out all sorts of things about you that are really none of your business. It takes a really big push against the drones who work for these humungous corporations, a threat to take your business elsewhere, in order to gain concessions that don’t require you to disclose your social security number.
But I lost today anyway. Even the last four digits of your social security number can get identity thieves a lot of access to your personal life, especially in conjunction with the other sorts of information I gave to the cable company earlier in the conversation.
So what’s the solution? On a collective level, there should be identifiers that aren’t associated with social security numbers, but “should be” isn’t at the same level as “will be.” Corporate America will keep asking me and you for our social security numbers when we try to set up the accounts that help us carry on in our lives. What can we do in the face of this?
Why are you blaming this on the “evil” corporations?
You should be placing blame where it belongs: on the government.
It’s managed to convince virtually every company you do business with to collect your social security number and store it with your customer records, just in case, even if they aren’t required by law (like the Unpatriotic Act) to do so.
I didn’t wholly place blame on the corporations; I partially placed blame on myself for my compliance.
I didn’t use the word evil, Michael; you did. I think you’re projecting some of your ideological insecurities here. I don’t think corporations are evil. I think they are wholly amoral and inhuman, which is quite different.
Last time I checked, there was no government mandate for corporations to collect social security numbers. As a matter of fact, government legislation at various levels has been enacted with the purpose of discouraging corporate use of whole social security numbers at least. Corporations have to varying degrees ignored this legislation.
That’s not to say that I wholly trust government either. Like a corporation, a government is a large, inhuman institution with interests that are not necessarily my own, an institution which insists on its own secrecy while poking into my personal affairs.
If I’m recalling correctly (which I may not be) one of the original tenets when the SSN number program was put in place, was that they were NOT to be used as personal identifiers. So much for that, if that was indeed the case.
I’ve done my own resistance to this practice by corporations with limited success. It’s amazing how many times someone will tell you they “NEED” your social security number for whatever reason. Of course your employer needs it for tax purposes, but a place I worked would write employee SSNs directly onto their time cards and used them all over internal paperwork for employee ID. Talk about identity thief paradise.
Oh, they’re quite amoral and inhuman. They are, after all, creations of the government.
There’s no government mandate for most corporations to collect social security numbers, aside from the PATRIOT Act, which only applies to some corporations, and a whole lot of government scare tactics directed at corporations: Get their SSN or you could be hiding terrorists and money launderers and the Mafia!