Keep an eye on your accounts. Consider signing up for ID protection. Change passwords. Etcetera, etcetera.
The good news is credit reporting is increasingly suspect to the point that bad credit might not be a big deal in the coming decade.
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That is good news. Now if we could get an actual national id instead of being forced to use social security numbers for everything, that would be even better.
Though bad news for me and my perfect credit :-p
You believe this government under this administration would actually be able/competent to complete/launch such a task.
I have opinions about things going on where I work. STRONG OPINIONS.
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Honestly, I think it’s just Americans that don’t wan’t to modernize and get a national ID system like a god damn modern country. Somehow having a national identity doesn’t really jive with many an Americans idea of freedom.
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I’m curious to see what you think of this article.
I like how the ACLU has to pretend that we aren’t already under such an oppressive regime of massive surveillance and repression of minorities so that their argument, that the extra convienance of the card would some how be the slippery slope that tumbles us into the dark ages, makes any sense.
Spent the afternoon putting a credit freeze on Equifax and Experian. Both cost 10 bucks a piece. I feel Equifax should have waived their fee. Because of their incompetent bullshit. For TransUnion, they offer a free credit lock feature so I went with that instead of the freeze.
This whole thing is incredible. As in, I don’t find it credible that a modern advanced country can have such a system where companies like Equifax can exist in its current form and that things like “credit freezes” exist and that it costs money…
And I just found out there is a fourth credit bureau.
It has valid concerns–a possible increase in harassment and discrimination, and as Kate_Monster said the difficulty for many groups to obtain one–but it was written back in the early 00s and should be revisited. Especially the government monitoring/privacy argument.
My issue is the overuse of social security numbers as a form of identification, which that article doesn’t address at all. At a minimum, I think we should be allowed–not required–to use passport numbers as ID with banks, schools, and any other institution that currently requests a SSN. In addition, laws should be put in place that require more verification on the institution’s side to verify that whomever gives them a number is it’s actual owner. What I’d like to see is something similar to Estonia’s national ID card, especially the public key cryptography aspect.
While I would love to see the USian government brought into the modern era, that first requires having a government committed to governing, which means enabling and encouraging voting participation & legitimacy, which means…
fuck it. 
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This thread looks relevant should someone open an account in your name.
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Bleh, I’m currently apartment hunting so I probably shouldn’t freeze my accounts until I finish with that…
https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/
Refunds for recently placed credit freezes: Equifax intends to automatically refund consumers who used credit cards to place a security freeze on their Equifax credit file starting at 5:00 PM EST on Thursday, Sept. 7, 2017. We are also planning to refund consumers who paid by check or money order, but we are still finalizing the details of executing those refunds.
“modern advanced country”
The thing is we’re not a modern advanced country. We’re stuck in our past, clinging to clearly failed ideas about how the world works. The US is an ancient juggernaut that never bothered to upgrade and is now too obsolete to repair.
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The U.S. merely happens to have a number of large cities which have become focal points for people around the world to gather. As long as the laws and systems are not so broken that those focal points stop being desirable, the U.S. can continue to take on the appearance of being a “modern advanced country” because of those cities.
An interesting piece of evidence: