Date of Birth and the Law

Are you talking about a customer or an employee? I know that you cannot ask a prospective employee his date of birth before hiring him, but you can (also his SS#) after he is employed.

No, there is no such law, however, if you want to do business
with them, you need to furnish the required information,
or otherwise they will decline.

I have had this happen with store credit cards. I would have saved 10 % on a substantial purchase, if I opened
an account with them. Since I didn't want to furnish them
with my SS#, I didn't get the card.

CJ- With credit cards, the store or credit card company needs to know your SS# in order to check you out with a credit bureau.

Recently, a law was passed where people are able to access a free credit report from the three major credit bureaus, once a year. You can get it here:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

There are other credit report sites, but the other ones try and suck you in to buying more extensive and ongoing credit reports.

Might sound as a stupid question for you, but what has your social security number to do with credits???

Thank you Phoenix, that's a great site - very informative.

Walter, your credit is connected with your social security number, and based on your ss# you can check your
credit rating.

Hah, I just checked my credit report and I have
excellent credit - no late payment, no negative reports, nothing, nada.

I guess, I am German after all

walter : in both canada and the united states the social-insurance number serves as an identifier for all kinds of information, but particularly credit information.
referring to cj's unwillingness to supply her social-insurance number to a merchant to obtain credit . we were in myrtle beach, s.c., a few years ago and made some major clothing purchases. the store wanted to promote its own credit card and offered 10 % off for anyone applying for a crdit card. it sounded good to us - but thought that our canadian social-insurance number wouldn't help us stateside to obtain a credit card . we had a credit card - based on our canadian social-insurance number - in less than five minutes !
gives you an idea how secure the number is, if a department store can access the canadian date base !
anyhow, we took our 10 % percent ... and security and privacy be damned ! hbg

from www.socialsecurity.gov
Your Social Security number and our records are confidential. We do not give your number to anyone, except when authorized by law. You should be careful about sharing your number with anyone who asks for it (even when you are provided with a benefit or service).

http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/

husker : you are right - but it's hard to pass up a 10% discount ! and as we found out, the register of the social security numbers must be fairly accessible.
having worked most of my life for a life-insurance company, i know that a lot of information about most - if not all - people is available when one knows where to look for it.
the company carried a lot of re-insurance on hollywood stars and the originating companies had to provide the medical data with the application for re-insurance. the filing clerks had great fun reading about the various medical treatments some of the stars were receiving. i understand that procedures have been tightened somewhat, but ... hbg

Companies are no longer allowed to use your SS# as an account number. Our medical insurance reissued new cards last year giving everyone a new account number that no longer contained the SS#. There were too many cases of identity theft related to public access of SS#s. I don't know if this is federally mandated or state by state.

J_B : in my case i was nit referring to social-insurance numbers, just to the availability of information that one might think is "confidental" (such as medical information).
every so often i see an article in the news about some records that were destined to be destroyed , being found flying around the windy streets of some city. once information has been captured, it's pretty difficult to gurantee its confidentiality.

as the story goes :
person 1 : 'can you keep a secret ?'
person 2 : 'certainly !'
person 1 : 'so can i !'

if we want to keep something confidential/secret, we best not give it to anyone else. hbg

That sounds really like big brother.