Credit: Istvan Banyai

I'd be a fool to include my Social Security number in this article: doing so would leave me vulnerable to all manner of credit fraud, scams, and even criminal arrest. All of this would surely happen because a few bad people would read the article, write down my SSN, and pretend to be me.

We know a lot more about the use and abuse of SSNs today than we did back in 2002. That was the year the California state legislature passed SB 1386, the first U.S. law requiring that consumers be notified when computer systems holding their personal information are "breached" or that information is otherwise compromised. Because of SB 1386, we learned in 2005 that ChoicePoint--a company most Americans had never heard of--had somehow sold detailed credit histories on more than 163,000 consumers directly to identity thieves (more than 800 people suffered direct losses as a result). And in 2007, we learned that identity thieves had broken into the computer systems of the discount retailer TJX and stolen more than 45 million credit-card numbers.

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