Your Information Is A Commodity

Planet College cautions care in every aspect of your student life. Care with your health, care with your grades, care with your friends and care with your finances. The previous post talks about your credit files. They contain information about your finances, credit history, and Planet College has briefly explained how you can stay current with your files.

This post is about your personal information.  There is a lot of it. Your age, your height, your weight, your address, your e-mail, your school status, marital status and so forth. Most of this is generally available to almost anyone and some companies use this information to 'market', that is to try to sell you stuff.  These efforts are legitimate and can afford a student worthwhile opportunities, those choices being up to you, the student.

This information is gathered by companies and frequently sold to other companies. Thus this information is a commodity.  It is sold by companies which operate for a profit. Again, this activity is long established and provided these companies operate within existing regulations and guidelines, the have the right to function as they do.

There is a category of information which is personal and should be carefully guarded. That information is your Social Security number, your Driver's license number and your credit card and bank account numbers. These are very, very valuable and should be carefully guarded by you.  At times it is necessary to provide this information, to your school for one thing.  To law enforcement, they will invariably ask for your driver's license number, for another.  Your bank or financial institution may request such information for purposes of identification.  These institutions are just about the common extent of places who need this information.

With one exception, employers, not potential employers, not POTENTIAL employers, NOT POTENTIAL employers, no, no, no, NOT POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS.  Only after you have been officially hired should you provide essential personal information to an employer.

This can be very tricky because some job applications have a space for Social Security number. Any legitimate potential employer will either tell you not to fill that in or say,"Don't fill that in yet." While the regulations and customs vary from place to place and industry to industry mostly employers can not ask for this type of personal information.  If you are filling out an application in person a polite inquiry to the interviewing person i.e. "Am I supposed to fill this out?" will usually result in a negative reply.

That is in person.

On line it is a whole different deal. Since now you have probably filled out many many forms and applications on line you are probably used to providing a great deal of personal information on on line forms.  The purpose of this post is to strongly suggest that if you do not know the source of the application you are completing do not provide sensitive personal information. No matter how good the deal sounds, or the job, don't send these basics, SS number, driver's license number and even your student ID number or you personal bank account numbers or credit card numbers blindly. That is don't send them to some place you can't see or can't find.  Also if the only address you can locate is an e-mail address don't do it.

Your personal information is very very valuable, use care with it.