Securing Personal Information: Smart phone
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@Reid-Cooper said:
It's horrible how social security numbers are abused in the US. Until the government decides to protect the people from identity predators by completely stopping the use of SSNs as IDs by third parties it will continue unabated. There is no incentive for the companies doing so to collect legitimate data.
But again, all this does is shift it from a government issued number to a privately issued one, how is that any safer?
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@Dashrender said:
Off topic I know, but how would you solve this? Even if the Credit companies all decided to assign you a unique number, how would it be any safer than a SSN?
Because it would be THEIR number to protect and not a public number needed by you and for you for nearly everything that you do. Your SSN is not an ID, is not unique, is not protected, is not secret, cannot be changed and is needed for a massive array over everyday things. It is used as a password, not an identifier in many cases.
Nearly everyone who stores information about you stores it privately. Credit agencies are unique in that they collect data not connected to you and tie it to you by something that is not an ID.
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Back on the original topic (because I was not here for a couple days)...
@g.jacobse mentions reducing accounts.. You cannot reduce accounts. You need to expand them.
Reducing accounts means tying more services to fewer accounts. That is the opposite of what you want to be doing.
You want all services to be unique accounts unrelated to each other. In theory you would have a different email for all of them, but that is going overboard.
Each service should never be linked to a Google account or Facebook account, etc. You should be signing up to each service directly using their internal account creation system with a unique password on each system.
Then use LastPass or KeyPass to handle all of the account authentication.
KeyPass is much less useful and the work it takes to make it as useful as LastPass is not worth the investment of time. LastPass is $12/year to gain access to the mobile app.
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It's over all that I'm trying to reduce the number of accounts. In cases of places like Pintrest - it has it's own account details,.. I didn't and don't trust the Google or Facebook sign in.
My Facebook page is close to being deleted... It's only there to follow a few people that I would not otherwise be able to follow / communicate with. Facebook mobile split the FB app and Messenger - I'm not installing the messenger - don't like extra crap on my phone.
I believe I have a total of seven GMail accounts.. separation and function,...
I will look at LastPass - but even at $12.oo a year,.. I'm not sure I want to pay for something... I like OpenSource and free if possible. But respect the authors and they do very much deserve support for the work they do.
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@g.jacobse I would keep the messenger and not use the FB app if I had to choose just one. Keep the one for communications.
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@g.jacobse said:
I will look at LastPass - but even at $12.oo a year,.. I'm not sure I want to pay for something... I like OpenSource and free if possible. But respect the authors and they do very much deserve support for the work they do.
It is free to use. You only have to pay for the Premium membership if you want to use the app on your mobile device. But at that point it is the same as KeyPass, just slightly better in that as a commercial application, things are generally more polished.
