Google's phone number and SSN based persona cloning

[An early version of this post was created accidentally -- I think the release version of Windows Live Writer has a brand new 'Save Draft' bug.]

This morning I wrote about persona cloning at the heart of social network fraud. I didn't, of course, know that Cringely had just published a fascinating example of persona cloning that, in a bizarre way, may have benefits for the victim. I've a few excerpts here, but this is one of Cringely's best. Read the whole thing ...

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Getting to Know You | PBS

While politicians and the U.S. Census Bureau may disagree on how many illegal aliens are living in the United States, the big credit reporting agencies have a pretty solid handle on the number and it is 17 million. That's 17 million adults of unproved nationality who have ongoing financial relationships with businesses or — believe it or not — governments...

... it isn't in any way close to the total number of U.S residents who have financial identities not tied to a Social Security number. That would be 37 million, meaning there are 20 million participants in the U.S. gray economy who aren't illegal, who are legitimate citizens. This means about 10 percent of U.S. residents are financially invisible, or think they are.

... Ah, but they do have Social Security numbers, just not their own. You need a Social Security number to sign up for utility services, for example. No Social Security number, no electricity, gas, phone, or satellite TV. So what's a poor alien to do? They go down to some local hangout and BUY a Social Security number to give to the utility. This has to be a legitimate number or it won't fly with utility computer systems, but does it have to be the customer's own number? ...

...there is a tacit agreement between the parties that a Social Security number must be provided because that's the rule, but if it happens to be someone else's Social Security number, well that's okay.

The funny thing about this is the impact it has to have on the person who was originally assigned that Social Security number by the U.S. government. Rather than hurt their credit it actually helps because there is so much evidence that they are good at paying their bills.

... some individual Social Security numbers are in use right now by UP TO 3,000 PEOPLE and it isn't at all unusual for a borrowed number to be used by 200-1,000 people at the same time. Remember that most of these folks AREN'T illegal aliens...

... Think for a moment of the impact a free mobile phone service will have on the mobile phone market. Why would I continue with Verizon or AT&T or Sprint or T-Mobile or Alltel or whomever if I could get the same or better service for free? Yeah, but the way to make the service free is by running ads on it and those ads would be contextually linked somehow to where or who you were calling and isn't that creepy, especially for business customers...

Which brings us back to the credit bureau. It would be very much in Google's interest to own one of the big three credit reporting agencies, because your mobile phone number is the most practical supplement for the Social Security number as a financial identifier.

Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity, then use the resulting product as both an information service and a database for targeting ads and you have Super Google — the most valuable company on Earth and entirely based on metadata...

It's a very fine piece of work, particularly the reporting on SSN overuse. That's rather relevant to those of us in the healthcare business -- we use the SSN as part of our statistical approach to establishing unique identities. We may have overestimated its value by an order of magnitude. Small detail.

Really, Cringely covers a lot of ground. Things are unlikely to work out so neatly, but the feel of it is right. The only thing I can add is that Cringely forgot about Google's GrandCentral. I just checked and my GC account still works [1]. Really, I'd forgotten about this digital identify of mine -- just one of many.

GrandCentral is your "personal phone number for life" with integrated message routing. It's a logical center piece of Google's identity strategy.

We're definitely getting close to the day when we're chipped at birth [2] and that number is our phone number for life ...

[1] If you put a GC number on your corporate business card you retain the number when you leave work. So you don't need to worry about losing your "identity" number when you lose your corporate cell phone.

[2] Hmm. Wonder if we could use the umbilical cord stump for chip insertion .... Just joking.