From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp*lib.org)
Date: Wed Feb 25 1998 - 00:37:28 MST
I'm looking into whether GTE will give one a phone w/o requiring your SSN.
I know PacBell will--they'll ask for a (possibly huge) deposit,
but they'll do it.
At 09:46 PM 2/23/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Michael Lorrey writes
>: ... I'll bet that if I wanted to, I could in one hour or less, find out
>: a significant amount of information about any American on this list, that
>: you would normally consider to be highly private information. Probably at
>: least some information you would normally think it would be illegal for me
>: to gain access to. This is the sort of big brother society that has been
>: warned of, but everybody is so absorbed in their own consumer satisfaction
>: that they have no idea of how much of their privacy they have given up.
>
>Portable telephones have become so cheap that I recently decided to get one
>and see whether it makes a difference in my life. So I dropped in at the
>Sprint* sales office across the street from where I earn my daily bread --
>and was asked for my pSeudo Security Number, for a credit check. "I'm not
>going to further compromise my privacy for a luxury," I said, and left.
>
>But maybe that was a pointless gesture...
>
>(*Sprint is one of the four biggest telephone companies here)
>
>Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com
>
>
"The highest love [is] uniquely human,
the product of compassion and liberty;
not one at the expense of the other."
-- L. A. Chu and M. M. Butler
(RU a bot? If not, be advised *s are flagged as 'net address ERRORS;
MY address is thus munged. Kindly hyphenate. "Go team, beat SP*M.")
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