>>>After hearing the kind of stuff Choice Point has on people it probably needs two fronts - what the government can do/have and what "private enterprise" can do/have, as well as when the twain can meet.
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>>There are already different constraints as to what the government and private concerns can have. We use social security numbers all the time to determine who we are dealing with, but in private industry that is a no-no.
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>It's supposed to be a no-no for everyone. The original charter of the Social Service Administration specified that SSN's were strictly for internal identification purposes. We can sure kiss that one goodbye.
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>Another privacy intrusion that has become commonplace is for merchants to ask for your phone number when you use a credit card. By law that is none of their business, but try to stop them. I always say no and generally the cashier enters a generic number such as the area code followed by 555-1212. These transactions probably get passed on to some government agency [g].

I have been giving 555-1212 ever since they started asking. I've had very few clerks who even noticed. For those who did, I always tell them to dial the number and ask for my extension.