AT&T has finally confirmed it is impacted by a data breach affecting 73 million current and former customers after initially denying the leaked data originated from them.
I just got a notification that includes
It appears the data is from more than 4 years ago and does not contain personal financial information or call history.
And later it says
What information was involved? The information varied by customer and account, but may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode.
What do they have that they consider personal if this doesn’t qualify?
“financial information” being…how much you paid. That’s why they worded it so precisely. “personal financial information”. They made it sound like “personal information”, so you skip over reading the rest.
Eventually we’re gonna have to have a way to change our social security number like we do with credit cards when they get hacked.
you can.
We can assign a different number only if:
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Sequential numbers assigned to members of the same family are causing problems.
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More than one person is assigned or using the same number.
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A victim of identity theft, who has attempted to fix problems resulting from the misuse but continues to be disadvantaged by using the original number.
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There is a situation of harassment, abuse or life endangerment.
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An individual has religious or cultural objections to certain numbers or digits in the original number. (We require written documentation in support of the objection from a religious group with which the number holder has an established relationship.) To request a different Social Security number, contact your local Social Security office for an in-person appointment.
This is actually a horrible implementation though, because they just tie your new number to your old number. They don’t invalidate your old number at all. So now you have two SSNs that can be used to steal your identity.
I don’t know if that is actually the case or not, but regardless, yeah, it’s overall a pretty bad system.
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