As always comes up, its not really identity theft, as that information doesnt help you do anything but defraud banks who are not taking time to properly verify who they are lending to. We just call it that so it's not the bank's fault. "Your identity was stolen, we couldn't do anything! "
Check a photo ID. Check a public cert. Take a fingerprint.
This. A bank you've never heard of fails to identify someone they're giving money to? Your problem, even though you weren't even one of the parties involved.
Is a credit agency illegally spreading false information about you? Not their problem, after all, they can't be expected to know they're spreading false information. Also, they advertise that they are in possession of credit monitoring systems capable of detecting this false information. How is this not libel?
I have heard that in some poorer countries, authorities are requiring fingerprints, passport size photos, and even video statements for certain transactions and real estate.
up till late 1990s SSN and DOB were public information, as they were printed on never-secured student IDs in American schools, for instance, and who knows where those unprotected lists went.
This practice went on all the way into the mid-2000s at least (I graduated in 2006 and my SSN (which doubled as a student id) was printed on my student ID back then)
My university used it as the student id, so who knows how many hundreds of places that got copied. Including smeared all over the virtual desktop systems as it was your login identifier.
It seems like it was tattoo artists (not the government) recommending tattoos, as you would expect. It is still interesting, but a bit less sensationalist.
Would that really be such a bad thing? Both seem completely replaceable as authentication steps.