You don’t have to be paranoid to think someone’s out to get you — you just have to live in our credit-oriented world and read the daily accounts online and off line about identity theft horror stories.
If you have a Social Security number — and virtually everyone in America DOES — and you have bank accounts, investments, and just about any sort of credit card, you are at risk for identity theft. No matter how secure we make ourselves, if someone wants to badly enough, they probably can find out personal/private information that gives them some sort of a toe hold on our financial lives.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is, of course, that we can be forewarned of the risks and help reduce them. There are identity theft protection plans offered by many banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. I’ve never used one, but I have heard that some are very affordable and very useful.
There is the simple step of disconnecting our Social Security numbers from our finances and public records as much as possible. For many years, the state I live in automatically used Social Security numbers for drivers’ license numbers. As identity theft issues grew, and as individuals protested the practice, our state joined most others in assigning random numbers to drivers’ licenses instead of using Social Security numbers.
I guess the bottom line is simply to use as much common sense as possible. Don’t give personal information of ANY KIND to people you don’t trust or know. And then, well, okay, maybe a bit of daily identity paranoia is wise.