A few months ago, the company I work for made me switch my mobile service to Verizon. I insisted on doing all business at one of their stores, paid cash for the phone and setup fees, and absolutely refused to give them my social security number. In addition to all this self inflicted inconvenience, Verizon went to great efforts to make the whole process more of a huge pain in the ass because I refused to give them my SSN. It took two weeks, three visits to their store, one letter, and a lot of grief from my boss (only some of which was directed at Verizon) before my phone was finally turned on. Moreover, getting warranty service from them without giving them my SSN was also quite annoying and tedious.

Now, after reading this article, I'm damn glad I went to all that trouble, and I'll definately do exactly the same in the future.

Never give the bastards any more information than they absolutely need. And they never need your Social Security Number. If Verizon spent as much effort protecting the personal information of their customers as they did trying to get the same information out of me, they might not have had this problem. They say they need your SSN to make sure they can trust you, but the real question any time someone wants your SSN is whether or not you can trust them.