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Re: Social Security Numbers
As the discussion on this seems to have gone international, I'll add a few words about the use of PINs in Israel. Every citizen and permanent resident in Israel is issued a PIN by the Ministry of Interior. This number is intended not only for administrative purposes, but for all general purposes where positive identification of the individual is necessary. It is considered public information, in a sense, as anyone in Israel is entitled under law to receive the PIN (as well as name and address) of anyone else registered in the official population registry. It is permitted to store identified information in an electronic database, subject to restrictions set out in Israel's Privacy Protection Law. One of these restrictions is that the information may be used only for the purpose for which it was collected. Under certain circumstances, such a database must also be registered. It is important to note that personal information might be identifiable by any means or combination of them: name, address, PIN etc.... In fact, sometimes a combination of what may seem to be innocuous unidentified information might lead to the identification of an individual (a problem that concerns statistical bureaus when publishing anonymous data sets). The Israeli law attaches no importance to the means by which personal information may be associated with an specific individual. It simply provides that once such identified information is collected in an electronic database for a particular purpose, that it may not be used for any other purpose without prior consent of the individuals involved. One exception to the above rule is that government offices are allowed to transfer identified information to other government offices when necessary in fulfilling legitimate government duties, and only if there are no specific statutory restrictions on such (such as statistical confidentiality under the Statistics Ordinance). _______________________________________ Brian Negin, Legal Advisor Israel Central Bureau of Statistics Tel: 972-2-6553200 Fax: 972-2-6553543 _______________________________________
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