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Is this advice really practical. Where I come from my social identity number is public and not a secret, and my bank info is something we hand out all the time if we want someone to transfer to our account (as it is designed for).

Moving to America and finding out that these two are your top secrets certainly seemed odd at first, but then I found out that no matter what you are doing you always have to give out your at least your SSN, but also your date of birth and sometimes your banking info.

The amount of times you need to give out information which is supposed to be private is so often that for any normal person it is unreasonable to assume they know when their not. That is, there are so many situations where you are unable to refuse handing out this information, that when the time comes where the right thing to do would be to not give out the information, you won’t know it.

This system seems optimized for scams.



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