Re: Previous employer contacts

[Lisa Wright <liwright -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Hi Bob,
I'd say that your privacy was seriously compromised, your financial 
security put at risk, and your HR department was negligent. That said, 
many universities also used SSN as an identifier. Hopefully the rise in 
identity theft is making all organizations aware of what a bad idea it 
is to use SSN. If an AOL employee can sell a roster of millions of email 
addresses to spammers, I'm guessing that SSNs and names would garner a 
fair price.

It is ridiculously easy for a company to generate a random number for 
employee/customer/user identifiers. Of course, your HR department does 
have to use your SSN to report wages and so on, but it should be very 
careful about how it handles that information. If your HR department is 
publicizing SSNs, it may be legal for you to insist on an alternative.

FWIW, I was on a client site a couple of days ago, looking through their 
online email address book to find job titles, and I was astonished at 
the amount of personal information that employees had entered in there 
(whether the company or the employee entered the information I could not 
determine). SSNs, spouse and children's names, birth dates for all, home 
addresses. Everything a thief could want.

I do fall into the seriously paranoid camp when it comes to personal 
information. The book "Google Hacks" has some great examples of the 
kinds of information you can get through a simple query, including from 
files that you would think are protected behind company firewalls. 
THEY'RE NOT. I bet Andrew Plato can tell plenty of stories from his 
security audits.

Lisa

written_by -at- juno -dot- com wrote: