I'm starting to kind of hope there is just a giant "leak" of every single US citizen's basic public information including SSN, etc. Get it all out there so we can stop having the debate over what is private information vs. public.

Then we can stop having this conversation constantly. None of this information is secret, I would put SSN into "quasi-secret" land since it takes such minimal effort to get at it.

We've been relying on security through obscurity for far too long. If the only thing stopping mass identity theft is someone compiling a list of otherwise public information, it's far beyond time we re-evaluate where the true problem lies.

So yeah, I agree. At some point society is going to actually have to confront this in a useful manner vs. hysterics and patching over an obviously failed system.

I didn't put mine on Facebook. What's step 2?

Are you registered to vote?

Then your info is publicly available for anyone to get. The government will just give it to you.

Don't want your freedoms threatened? Avoid attention by never exercising them!

I reject the argument that those who aggregate vast troves of data about people, publicly available or voluntarily shared though they may be, are exempt from any sort of responsibility for the curation and deployment of said data. Informational asymmetries lead to power imbalances, and sufficiently severe power imbalances lead to oppression.

It's still not clear that this is all publicly available information.