We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password.

Ideally, nothing nefarious should happen if both of them were listed and queryable publicly.

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silversmith 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?

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ryandrake 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If someone has your bank account and bank’s routing number (which is also not secret), they can make fraudulent ACH transfers and payments from your account. Of course it will most likely be caught as fraud some time after the fact, but just those two bits of not-secret info are enough to grief someone.

	▲	hackermailman 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Knuth had to stop sending real checks for errors spotted in his books because they would post pics of the check and thieves abused the account https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
	▲	rogerrogerr 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And both numbers, plus your name and address and a convenient sample of your signature, are on every check you’ve ever written.

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mystifyingpoi an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AFAIK that's US thing. In normal countries bank account numbers are not a secret. The worst thing that can happen is someone sending you money.

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jazzyjackson 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes but there are steep penalties for bank fraud so it is not especially common

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derektank 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s quite ridiculous that we haven’t been able to build a modern identification system capable of replacing SSNs in the last 30 years.