OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED
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@dkf Do you use - or even have - anything like Social Security Numbers? I mean, SSNs are sort of a 'Merkin thing, obviously, which assume was your point, though I expect that you have something similar (though probably called something else).
Mind you, legally speaking, we use SSNs for a lot of things that you aren't supposed to use them for, and in fact are technically illegal to use them for. The sole legal use of a Social Security Number is for identifying an employee's tax records; the only time they can legally be requested or used at all is a) when an employer uses it to verify that a new hire is legally eligible to work in the US; b) as an Employee Identification Number when submitting paperwork regarding Social Security benefits and related Federal social-support programs such as Unemployment Insurance (which needs to verify employment) and Medicare (which uses employment history in part for eligibility and for calculating benefits).
It is, or at least was at one time, a Federal crime to use them for anything else, including the equivalent social-support programs on the state, county, and municipal levels.
Oh, and they aren't unique and were never intended to be, because the program they were originally for was only meant to be a temporary, emergency measure for coping with the Great Depression (which, technically speaking, had actually ended before Roosevelt was elected, but everyone was still broke, so...) thrown together quickly and meant only to be used until a more complete system could be developed. Somewhere around WWII, less than ten years after the law was passed, that part seems to have been forgotten.
Not only do they get recycled ten years after the party they are held by is declared dead (as well as some other circumstances I am not terribly clear on), it used to be that if you lost your SSN card, you would just request a new card - which would have a new number, because it wasn't for general identification, just identifying you for Social Security and employment.
This started to change around the mid-1980s, but to be honest I don't really know the reasons why.
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@ScholRLEA said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
Do you use - or even have - anything like Social Security Numbers?
We've got them, but only really need them when getting a job that handles your taxes for you or applying for bank account that does auto tax rebates; if it touches on the tax system, it's needed, but otherwise not. So they're pretty similar to your official system (except for not being involved with healthcare at all).
No idea if it is a crime to use them for anything else, but I know I've not needed to look up mine for around a decade.
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@dkf are you talking about the NI number of is there another one?
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@Jaloopa said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
are you talking about the NI number of is there another one?
I'm thinking about the NI number.
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@dkf said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
@Jaloopa said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
are you talking about the NI number of is there another one?
I'm thinking about the NI number.
We are the numbers who say NI! NI! NI!
I'm funny from 1980!
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@Lorne-Kates Canadians get films 5 years after everyone else?
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@Arantor It's the localisation effect. It takes time to add all those “Eh?”s to it.
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@Arantor said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
@Lorne-Kates Canadians get films 5 years after everyone else?
We used to. You know, it takes a lot of time to ship through the snow storms using dog sleds.
But now we have BitTorrent, so things are different.
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@flabdablet said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
Is GMX any good? I was considering them for a while before I eventually settled on Fastmail (who definitely are any good but cost moneys).
I worked there for a couple of years under
abuse@
, and have had an account since the last millennium. Technically they're pretty good, mostly. Competent admins, quite secure and running under German privacy law. The webmail can't hold a candle to gmail, even less with the free accounts that are ad-financed, but if you use it as a simple mail store it's fine. I think the free accounts have IMAP now, too, it used to be reserved for paying customers.
It's also the place of one of the biggest I've ever seen but that wasn't really related to the mail systems :D
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@Yamikuronue said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
Not everyone's emails are public, though.
If it wasn't public, it couldn't have been scraped, nor leaked*
*my guess anyway
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@darkmatter said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
@Yamikuronue said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
Not everyone's emails are public, though.
If it wasn't public, it couldn't have been scraped, nor leaked*
*my guess anyway
Most leaks aren't scraped information.
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This post is deleted!
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@TimeBandit said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
@Arantor said in OH NO I'VE BEEN PWNED:
@Lorne-Kates Canadians get films 5 years after everyone else?
We used to. You know, it takes a lot of time to ship through the snow storms using dog sleds.
But now we have BitTorrent, so things are different.
Sadly, 90% of the above is true.