U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's idea of legislation that would prevent non-Social Security Administration related groups from using our Social Security Numbers to identify us is a noble, but ultimately useless, one.
Paul's law, if enacted, would require institutions like universities, at which SSNs are heavily used to keep track of students and personnel, to find alternate means of identification.
It seems anyone with your SSN and a little bit of other personal information can do mean things to you like change your enrollment or - on a larger scale - obtain false documents.
So Paul wants to stop this potential breach of privacy by asking all the places that use SSNs for identification to come up with something different. But the problem is that, even if they do find alternate ways of identifying you, your privacy won't remain intact.
The University of Houston, for example, adopted new ID codes on its Cougar OneCards. But these are no more private than the old SSN-based cards. After all, if someone is after your information, it will probably make no difference whether they have to get a nine-digit SSN or a 16-digit ID code.
What we really need to protect our privacy, as a Paul spokesman suggested, are alternate security measures like personal identification numbers or passwords. They work for ATM cards and Internet accounts; why can't they work around the campus?
What we really need, if we are to be concerned with our privacy, is something more than restricted use of Social Security Numbers, which will probably prove confusing and cumbersome. True security lies in information that only you know, and that you can change and keep secret, like a personal code.
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