Scary AT&T breach leaks up to 70 million Social Security numbers to the dark web
Data breach occurred two weeks ago.
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Why is AT&T even using Social Security numbers?
Credit checks
I haven’t been a customer for like ten years. And they only needed the ss number ten years before that. Why the hell did they retain that info after the credit check? Why the hell did they retain it after I stopped using their service?
Every major cell provider offering non pre-paid service does this. You run your credit when you open the account, but they can hold on to the info in that credit app indefinitely. Usually it's kept on file to make sure no one else attempts to open an account using your info. If a new app gets run with your social and they already have an account with that social, the new credit app gets flagged for review.
We need a GDPR equivalent, but US politicians aren’t interested in protecting individuals
We need identity to be disconnected from authorization so it hardly matters if your SSN leaks.
They’ll pay a fine of like $120M, appeal or have it waived down to $24M and a new law will be passed barring a class action or any further ramifications when it happens again.
Unless it's tiktok and all the sudden they give all the shits
If you give your ss number out, you should assume the company will save it forever and misuse it.
We have ss numbers from customers dating back at least 15 years. It saves us time if they come back, that’s the only reason they’re kept that long (to my knowledge). It’s a casino, we need ss if you win enough to pay taxes. So, we do need to keep them for some length of time.
But, ss are visible to most customer service staff that handle reward cards (starting pay is the defacto minimum wage for the area for some of those roles, btw).
Because they are both evil and incompetent.
