Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Identity Theft and Use of Social Security Numbers

  Marc Orchant at The Tablet PC Weblog passes along some good tips for preventing identity theft . Among them: 2. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put “PHOTO ID REQUIRED”.. This highlights a problem in general with using the signature as a means of authentication. It relies on the cashier to actually look at the card and, more often than not, they don't. In fact, many drugstores and grocery stores now have machines where you swipe the card yourself - it is never even in the possession of the cashier. Case in point: When I got a new American Express card, I forgot to sign it initially. I noticed this after the first purchase, where the cashier did not check. As an experiment, I still haven't signed it and have used it extensively over the past three months. On a related note: These days, your Social Security Number (SSN) is basically the key to your identity. This is especially true because a lot of your other information is readily available these days (see The Curse of... Posted Mar 06 2005, 04:45 PM by Tim with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Intellectual Property, Law School, Privacy