Your Social Security card will soon be available digitally. What to know
Now, the Social Security Administration is looking to give that form of ID an update by enabling secure digital access to Social Security numbers that will provide an alternative to the traditional Social Security card. Experts are cautiously optimistic about the idea, but have some security concerns.
The new digital feature will allow individuals who have either forgotten their Social Security number or who have lost their Social Security cards to access their personal number online through the agency's My Social Security website. They will also be able to access their Social Security numbers through digital devices and display them as identification for "reasons other than handling Social Security matters," according to the agency.
More from Personal Finance:Social Security reduces benefit clawback rateTrump administration restarts student loan collectionsWhat experts say about claiming Social Security benefits early
With the new effort, the Social Security Administration aims to reduce the inconveniences caused by lost or stolen cards, which currently requires individuals to apply for replacements either online or in person.
"We believe that this modern approach will meet the needs of our constituents in a more efficient manner," Social Security Administration acting commissioner Lee Dudek said in a statement.
The agency declined to provide more details the rollout, which is scheduled to become available early this summer.
Experts are cautiously optimistic about the change.
"Generally, anything that is a new avenue for accessing your account or in an interaction with Social Security is a good thing, so long as it's easy and secure," said Richard Fiesta, executive director at the Alliance for Retired Americans.
However, the risk is that some individuals, particularly those who are older or disabled, may be left without access if they are not as tech savvy and have difficulty using the internet or mobile phones, he said.
My Social Security is "not the most customer friendly website," Fiesta said, despite efforts to improve it over the years.
The move toward digital Social Security identification is "certainly a step in the right direction," said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center.
If implemented properly, the digital Social Security numbers may provide more security than paper cards, she said.
"But it really doesn't solve the problem of identity misuse," Velasquez said.
Every adult's Social Security number has likely already been breached, according to Velasquez. The size of the 2024 National Public Data breach prompted some experts to speculate every American could have been affected. The 2017 Equifax breach was estimated to have affected roughly half the U.S. population.
The new process will raise questions as to how to protect both the Social Security numbers and the devices on which they are accessed, she said.
Ultimately, the U.S. in the future will likely move toward a federated identity system, where a user's identity can be verified with biometric data like fingerprints and facial recognition that is linked across multiple systems, said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at The National Cybersecurity Alliance.
"There's going to be a future where there's a clean internet, where everyone that uses it has authenticated with this federated, proven identity so that nobody can pretend to be anybody else," Steinhauer said.
The Social Security Administration's move is a first step toward digital identification, though it does not appear to include biometric authentication, he said.
Because there will be risk for fraud, it will be important for the Social Security Administration to make sure its systems are properly protected, Steinhauer said. There should also be phishing-resistant authentication installed to ensure that only authorized individuals access the accounts, he said.
It will be important for individuals to verify that any messages that allegedly come from the Social Security Administration do, in fact, take them to a verified Social Security website.
Any messages the agency sends out, such as a reminder to log in and check an account, could be copied for phishing purposes, Steinhauer said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
31 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ex-Washington Post fact checker hits ‘absentee owner' Bezos, tells him to commit to saving paper or sell it
The Washington Post is a sinking ship with a captain missing in action. And according to its now-former fact-checker, that missing captain is its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. "He has to be committed to it. If he's not committed to it, he should find someone else to own it," Glenn Kessler told Fox News Digital. "I feel like he was kind of committed to it. And then he's kind of an absentee owner, and he shouldn't be because it's, you know, one of the prime assets of American journalism." Kessler left the Post in July after more than 27 years at the paper — and his final years there were not the best. "What's so saddening is that five years ago, I would not have imagined The Washington Post would be in this state," Kessler said. Washington Post's Efforts To Court Conservatives Could Drive Away Its Liberal Readers, Ex-fact Checker Warns Kessler never considered leaving the Post until he was presented with the buyout offer, which he accepted. The Post has been financially bleeding, so much so that it reportedly was on pace to lose at least $77 million in 2024. The buyouts had targeted the most veteran staffers, aiming to cut costs and ward off layoffs for the time being. Read On The Fox News App The famed fact-checker was among several high-profile journalists and columnists who have left the paper in recent months, many of whom took issue with decisions and editorial changes Bezos himself had ordered. Kessler compared the Post to "being on the Titanic after it struck an iceberg — drifting aimlessly as it sank, with not enough lifeboats for everyone" in a piece he wrote on his newly-launched Substack account. "They have to have a vision of where they want to go. And I've not seen that vision yet. Or if there is a vision, it's not been clearly articulated," Kessler said. "It's gonna be a really rocky period in the news business in the next five to ten years. And the Post needs to be prepared for that. And I kind of feel like they've lost a lot of, you know, important sailors and captains to keep the ship going. So they're gonna have to make do with less." Bezos has been the target of intense blowback by liberals, who've accused him of bending the knee to President Donald Trump based on actions that have rocked the paper. First was his decision in October to halt the planned endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris just days before the presidential election. Then, in February, he launched a new mission for the editorial pages to promote "personal liberties and free markets," vowing to not publish any pieces that go against those principles. Both instances sparked rebellion among the paper's liberal readers, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of subscriptions. Several staffers also resigned in protest. But Kessler wasn't always a Bezos critic. He credited the Amazon founder for saving the Post when he bought it in 2013. "Before Bezos bought the newspaper, it was in really bad shape," he told Fox News Digital. "People forget how, you know, because the Graham family didn't really have the resources to keep it going in the new era. And there had been a bunch of buyouts and people were asked to leave. So it had been a pretty grim period then." Washington Post Bombarded With 'Cake' Parties For Departing Staffers Things at the Post were souring so much so that Kessler himself had been interviewing for a different job outside the paper. That was until he was offered The Fact Checker stint in 2011, which he accepted, thinking that if the ship went down, he himself could stay afloat with his own "brand." "But then Bezos bought the paper, and he invested a lot of money in the paper," Kessler said. "So the size of the staff doubled. The number of foreign bureaus probably went up [by] at least a third. The resources devoted to engineering support surged, so the web pages started loading faster, and we could do fantastic graphics. There was investment in video… And you really felt like the Post was going places, and it was actually producing better journalism at any point in the time I had worked at the Post." "And now it is just… it's like it hit an iceberg, and it's kind of drifting there, and I don't think there's a plan to rescue it. Or at least a plan to, you know, turn the ship around and get it moving in the direction it was." Kessler blamed management for being "a little dazzled" by the traffic spike that came during the first Trump administration, reaching levels "almost equal" to the Post's top rival, The New York Times. But then, unlike the Times, the Post failed to capitalize on its new readers by not expanding its portfolio. "I've sat in many meetings and had many discussions and heard lots of speeches. I still have no idea what they're trying to do," Kessler said of his former bosses. "It vaguely seems to say we're gonna appeal [to] the people… who don't really care about the news. And we're gonna provide products that would allow them to read The Washington Post and find out information they need to know," he said. "And the problem, as I wrote in my piece, is that that's what The New York Times has been doing for ten years. They have 10 million subscribers, but a large chunk of that are people that don't get the core news product," Kessler continued. "They get the recipes, they get The Athletic — the sports section, they get product recommendations, they get the games, they play Wordle." Washington Post Reeling From Buyout Exodus As Bosses Hope To Turn The Page At Embattled Paper He said the Post is stuck with "the Avis problem," citing the car rental company's old ads that claimed "We try harder," alluding to the reality it was always in the shadow of Hertz, a dynamic similar to the Gray Lady. "The Washington Post has always been No. 2. It's never had the same size circulation as the Times. I would argue news coverage was better, but maybe I was biased about that," Kessler conceded to Fox News Digital. "But now in this fragmented marketplace, people have to make a choice. What Substacks am I going to subscribe to? What newsletters am I gonna get? What networks am I going to watch? 'Oh, I need one newspaper. I'll be willing to spend money on one newspaper,' and the default is always going to be, unfortunately, The New York Times." He continued, "It's a broader product. It has better arts coverage, theater coverage. I've never gotten an understanding of how the Post was going to combat that problem. And it sounded like the solution was, 'Oh, we're going to be like a mini-me New York Times with things to appeal to people that don't follow news.' Well, they already get that in The New York Times." The Post has scrapped an initiative launched last year dubbed "WP Ventures," meant to attract social media users. However, the paper appears to already be pivoting with Tuesday's announcement of former Axios executive editor and former Post reporter, Sara Kehaulani Goo, returning as its president of Creator Network — a new position Goo says will be "creating personality-driven content" and help provide advertisers "access" to a new audience driven by creators. The Times and the rise of new media weren't the only obstacles facing the Post. "Midway through my journalism career, I started saying, 'I'm working for a dinosaur.' And AI is quite possibly the meteorite that will kill off the last of the dinosaurs," Kessler said to Fox News Digital. "I'm greatly concerned about what AI is gonna do, because AI is gonna kill search. And search was how people often found our news articles." "The statistics I had seen was that four or five years ago, every 100 searches on Google yielded six clicks on a news site. Now it's about every 100 searches yields two clicks on the news site. When people use AI, a thousand searches result in one click," he continued. "So it's a dramatic difference. And if I were running a news organization, at this point, I don't know quite what I would do about that. So it's a bad time to be running a new organization. I do have sympathy for the situation that [Washington Post publisher and CEO] Will Lewis and [Washington Post executive editor] Matt Murray find themselves in right now. I just question whether or not they really have figured out what to do." Goo said in her announcement that "we're going to be infusing AI with everything that we do to help us maximize efficiency and scale." But the buck ultimately stops with Bezos, according to Kessler. "The Post was really at its high point [after Bezos' purchase]— the amount of stories we're producing, the quality of the stories was really significant. And then, traffic surged when Trump got elected and there was so much hunger and interest in the news we were producing. We kind of lost our way after that," Kessler said. "And not only lost our way, we started losing oodles of money. A hundred million dollars one year, I think the last number I saw [in] 2023 was $77 million… I think even for a person as rich as Jeff Bezos, that counts as real money." "And I have gotten the sense that he's a bit of an absentee owner. He's had other distractions, and he's committed more to some of his other enterprises, such as a space company, than he is to The Washington Post, which is really just a tiny part of his business investments. And maybe, I don't know, I hate to speculate, maybe you thought he gave us his best shot, and we blew it, and now we've got it muddled through," he added. A spokesperson for The Washington Post told Fox News Digital, "The Washington Post is reinventing itself to be a trusted news source for all Americans. That means working hard each day to publish the most accurate news, alongside opinions that resonate across the nation."Original article source: Ex-Washington Post fact checker hits 'absentee owner' Bezos, tells him to commit to saving paper or sell it Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
With 50% ownership, Schaffer Corporation Limited (ASX:SFC) insiders have a lot riding on the company's future
Explore Schaffer's Fair Values from the Community and select yours Key Insights Schaffer's significant insider ownership suggests inherent interests in company's expansion The top 5 shareholders own 53% of the company 18% of Schaffer is held by Institutions Trump has pledged to "unleash" American oil and gas and these 15 US stocks have developments that are poised to benefit. Every investor in Schaffer Corporation Limited (ASX:SFC) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are individual insiders with 50% ownership. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn). With such a notable stake in the company, insiders would be highly incentivised to make value accretive decisions. Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Schaffer, beginning with the chart below. See our latest analysis for Schaffer What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Schaffer? Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices. We can see that Schaffer does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Schaffer's historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story. Schaffer is not owned by hedge funds. With a 20% stake, CEO John Schaffer is the largest shareholder. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 9.6% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 8.4% by the third-largest shareholder. To make our study more interesting, we found that the top 5 shareholders control more than half of the company which implies that this group has considerable sway over the company's decision-making. While it makes sense to study institutional ownership data for a company, it also makes sense to study analyst sentiments to know which way the wind is blowing. Our information suggests that there isn't any analyst coverage of the stock, so it is probably little known. Insider Ownership Of Schaffer The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO. I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions. It seems insiders own a significant proportion of Schaffer Corporation Limited. Insiders have a AU$141m stake in this AU$284m business. This may suggest that the founders still own a lot of shares. You can click here to see if they have been buying or selling. General Public Ownership The general public-- including retail investors -- own 19% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. While this size of ownership may not be enough to sway a policy decision in their favour, they can still make a collective impact on company policies. Private Company Ownership Our data indicates that Private Companies hold 13%, of the company's shares. It's hard to draw any conclusions from this fact alone, so its worth looking into who owns those private companies. Sometimes insiders or other related parties have an interest in shares in a public company through a separate private company. Next Steps: While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important. For example, we've discovered 3 warning signs for Schaffer (1 shouldn't be ignored!) that you should be aware of before investing here. Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Decades of Socialist Rule at Stake as Bolivia Vote Count Starts
(Bloomberg) -- The vote count is underway in Bolivia's presidential and congressional elections that may end years of socialist rule and herald warmer relations with Washington. The US-Canadian Road Safety Gap Is Getting Wider A Photographer's Pipe Dream: Capturing New York's Vast Water System Festivals and Parades Are Canceled Amid US Immigration Anxiety A London Apartment Tower With Echoes of Victorian Rail and Ancient Rome Princeton Plans New Budget Cuts as Pressure From Trump Builds The election took place amid unrest, shortages and the steepest inflation in more than three decades. The economic crisis has undermined support for the ruling MAS party, which has held power almost without interruption since 2006. Two pro-business candidates are battling for the upper hand in a field of eight presidential aspirants. Preliminary results are expected on Sunday evening. Samuel Doria Medina made a fortune in cement, then invested in fast food chains such as Burger King and Subway. Jorge Tuto Quiroga served as president in 2001-2002 when President Hugo Bánzer Suárez stepped down due to ill health. Both candidates say they would cut spending and seek international loans to inject capital into the economy. Both also would seek foreign investment in oil and gas exploration and in lithium production — Bolivia is home to the world's largest deposits of the metal. The highest-profile leftist candidate is Andrónico Rodríguez, a socialist senator who has distanced himself from both the current president, Luis Arce, and former President Evo Morales, whose feud split the ruling party. Arce opted not to run for a second term. Morales called on supporters to spoil their votes. The election is the first since 2005 when neither Morales nor a hand-picked successor were on the ballot. Under Bolivian election rules, a candidate can win in the first round with just 40% of the vote, provided there's a margin of more than ten percentage points over the runner-up. If no one wins in the first round, there'll be a runoff on Oct. 19. The new president will be sworn in on Nov. 8. The economy has been struggling for a decade amid declining natural gas production and dwindling central bank dollar reserves. Bolivia's dollar bonds have been among the top performers in emerging markets this year, on optimism that the election will herald a government able to unlock international loans and implement economic reforms. Under Morales and Arce, Bolivia had close links with Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia and China but often had sour relations with Washington. What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates Living With 12 Strangers to Ease a Housing Crunch Bessent on Tariffs, Deficits and Embracing Trump's Economic Plan How Syrian Immigrants Are Boosting Germany's Economy ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio
