There is seemingly less and less reason for identities at all.
Why should T-Mobile care who it is they are giving phone service to? As long as the bills are paid on time, it shouldn't matter. Here's my order ID and my password.
And before anyone makes the terrorism argument, it would seem that our country has deprioritized that initiative.
> Why should T-Mobile care who it is they are giving phone service to? As long as the bills are paid on time, it shouldn't matter. Here's my order ID and my password
Therein lies the problem. Phones these days are sold on loans and this is a postpaid service meaning each billing cycle you owe for the prior billing cycle. People defaulting on phone bills is more common than you think.
I recall some time about ~25 years ago where Sprint was offering a no credit check/no deposit special. They ended it due to having to write off a large portion of their non-paying users. It also ended up being a net loss of total users for them, an unheard of situation in a time of rapid growth and a market nowhere near saturation.
So just have a prepaid option with the same plethora of plans as postpaid, and not require ID? Cut service instantaneously if not prepaid on time before 1st of the month. Or even add on a $100 deposit which buys you a 1 month grace period any time.
> Why should T-Mobile care who it is they are giving phone service to? As long as the bills are paid on time, it shouldn't matter. Here's my order ID and my password.
It's super helpful if T-Mobile knows who I am so they can give me a new sim when my phone is lost or stolen. Of course, it's not great when they give someone else a new sim when they claim to be me and that my phone is lost or stolen.
The bigger question, though, should be why are they storing the actual SSN? They can run a credit check and store only the result of the credit check and not all the personal data they had to collect to run the check. Presumably, they do need some way to report delinquent accounts to the credit bureaus after the fact, but there's no reason why credit monitors can't use a tokenized system (i.e. submit the SSN to the credit bureau and receive back a UUID which has the singular purpose of reporting back to the credit monitors.)
We really need to start attaching eye-watering financial penalties to companies that leak data so that we make the only sane decision be not storing that data in the first place. Collect it and shuttle it to where it needs to go...but under no circumstances commit it to at rest storage.
When they offer phones on payment they're essentially providing a loan. This does carry some risk as it is, even more if they're not running a credit check.
Why should T-Mobile care who it is they are giving phone service to? As long as the bills are paid on time, it shouldn't matter. Here's my order ID and my password.
And before anyone makes the terrorism argument, it would seem that our country has deprioritized that initiative.