Are you who you think I am?

On December 4, Dubya signed into law legislation that its supporters claim is a major move toward preventing identity theft.

"People work hard to build up good credit histories and rely on their credit to move forward in life," Bush said during a signing ceremony at the White House. "Today we're helping to make our credit system fair, fair to all, and to better protect people from those who would abuse it."

The legislation renewed the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which set a national credit reporting standard to make it easier for people to get credit cards, loans and mortgages. Without reauthorization by Congress, the act would have expired.

But as is typical, the GOP giveth and the GOP taketh away.

Opponents said it pre-empts tougher state privacy laws that prevent businesses from sharing their customers' financial information with other companies. Critics also wanted lawmakers to change a provision that would stop states from setting separate rules on how businesses use, share and report data on consumers.

In other words, we are being force-fed a lowest common denominator approach that looks good on the surface while actually limiting our existing and potential protection and demanding as little as possible from the corporations that spread our personal information all over the business-sphere. For example, the law

requires businesses to black out Social Security numbers, parts of credit card numbers and debit card numbers on receipts, and require the coding of medical information on credit reports

but places no limits on what information they can gather or how they can use it. (By the way, they have to "black out" parts of identifying numbers? Why the hell are they on receipts at all?)

If we're actually going to be serious about preventing identify theft, it's pointless to look to free yearly credit reports and a system that enables a single phone call to "set off a nationwide fraud alert," which the bill also establishes. They're good to have, better to have than to not have, but they only apply to discovering and chasing down ID theft after it's happened, not to preventing it.

The best prevention is increased privacy and increased privacy means limiting the amount of personal information available and how it can be used. A solid step, which I have long advocated, is to bar anyone from asking for your social security number unless they have specific need of it to comply with federal reporting requirements. For most people, that would mean only your employer, your bank (both of which have to make reports to the IRS), and perhaps a few others.

Insurance companies, credit bureaus, hospitals, probably a number of schools and state motor vehicle bureaus (which often use your SS number as your student ID or driver's license number), and a good number of law enforcement agencies would doubtless howl at such a suggestion. Frankly, TS. That only goes to show just how much information about you is available to just how many people. And our privacy and security are more important than their convenience.