From: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 00:27:20 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Secrecy: My life as a nym. (Was: nym blown?)
In-Reply-To: <199611111626.IAA31552@crypt>
Message-ID: <v03007800aeade37ef979@[207.167.93.63]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 8:26 AM -0800 11/11/96, Hal Finney wrote:

>I have two kids entering their teens, and I'm sure other list members are
>parents as well.  What can we do for our children to help them enter their
>adult lives with better chances to retain privacy?  Unicorn mentions keeping
>them absent from school on picture day, although I'm not sure how much this
>helps.  I suppose it makes it harder for an investigator to find out what
>they look(ed) like.  Then when they get old enough to drive you have a new
>problem avoiding the photo (and thumbprint) on the license.
>
>Are there other measures which parents could take while their children are
>young to get them off to a good start, privacy-wise?

I think there are two important domains of privacy to distinguish:

1. The mundane.

2, The political.

The mundane domain is what most people think of initially, Things like "How
do I keep my name out of the system?" Or the point about kids.

The fact is, hundreds of millions of names are obviously--and almost
unavoidably--in the mundane public sector. I say "almost unavoidably"
because driver's licenses and social security numbers are ubiquitous.

(Side note: Jim McCoy's suggestion that kids can be kept off the
parental-unit's tax returns and thus not get a SS number is fraught with
problems. Many schools--including public schools--use the SS number for
various internal and tracking reasons. Even if the kid is free of SS
numbers until he's a teenager--at a cost of thousands of dollars a year in
IRS deductions not taken--he'll essentially have to have an SS number in
his high school years, for a variety of reasons. Maybe this can be avoided,
but I doubt the reward is worth the hassles.)

The second category is that of the political domain. If a person can
separate himself from the comments he makes, as Alois^H^H^H^H^H Black
Unicorn has done, then it hardly matters--in an important sense--that his
True Name has a SS number on file somewhere.

This is an important distinction in discussing privacy, I think. If I had a
rug rat, I doubt I'd go to great lengths to avoid getting him or her an SS
number. If the Feds offered me a yearly savings of $1000 or more on my
taxes, I'd take it.

(Given that it's almost an inevitability that the kid would have to "enter
the system" at about the age where it really begins to matter, e.g, the age
at which he or she begins to have political beliefs.)

--Tim May

"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."