<p>The social security act of 1938 specifically stated that the social security number was never to be used as a national identification number; it is only to be used for the filing of taxes.</p>
<p>Never give your social security number to testing services or college, unless they are need it to issue you a paycheck. Ask that an alternate number be used; if you ask nicely to speak to a manager, they will usually be quite helpful.</p>
<p>you are right toadstool…but when the government itself uses it in that manner…what can one do?</p>
<p>We handle a lot of customer data at work. We are required to mask customer identifiers - name, address, birthdate. Even for testing, when we move data from production to development or testing environment those fields are encrypted. I also wonder what kind of security they had on the laptop? For Cornell and all of our sakes I hope they have followed the school security procedure, if there is one. This is so big, I heard on our news this morning.</p>
<p>I’ve also noticed that almost all the responses I’ve seen on Twitter and facebook are people sarcastically thanking Cornell. I am still gathering info from articles and awaiting my mailing.</p>
<p>According to the Daily Sun, similar incidents of smaller magnitude have occurred at Cornell before…</p>
<p>My son is one of the 45,000. He’s not a minority.</p>
<p>Well, I placed a fraud alert. No suspicious activity on my credit report so far.</p>