mother's maiden name

I'm reading a report on how to assess and evaluate, and it talks about creating a unique identifier: "often some combination of birth date and mother's maiden name or social security number." It's a small note, but it got me thinking about my unique identifiers and how I use them or allow them to get used. All through my youth, my mother used her mother's maiden name as an identifier to financial institutions and the like, and used my father's social security number when working with the government (he was in the Navy, so they didn't care much about her SSN.) Neither are ideal as identifiers; we all know at this point how easy it is to steal an identity with a SSN and a few other pieces of information, so we've gotten much more cautious about who we give it out to. In a large city, your mother's maiden name would be relatively difficult to track down, but in a small town it would be common knowledge. And in a small town bank, stealing someone's identity with their mother's maiden name would be ludicrous, since you would walk and everyone would know that you're not Betty Smith's daughter. But over the internet, or even over the phone, everything changes, and losing control of that information makes it easy for someone else to use it to gain access to your life.

That got me thinking about research in rural areas--if you went to the same high school that your mother did, and people know it, wouldn't that make you more casual about giving out your mother's maiden name in general? Wouldn't it make you suspicious of people who did research under the assumption that that information was private? Wouldn't you be concerned enough about your privacy to decline the study (or worse, lie) because you assumed that the data gatherer was somehow connected to your neighbor, your church, your employer? Many folks are wary of information gatherers anyway; I'm one of them, and do everything I can to thwart those obnoxious grocery-store "value" cards. But asking for a "private" passcode that you know is actually pretty public just undermines your credibility as a researcher.

Us academic types do so much data collection that we lose track of the idea that this information is sometimes quite valuable or damaging, financially or otherwise. And of course, we know all about confidentiality and keeping information private, but we often forget that the participant loses control of the information whether it stays safely stored inside the locked filing cabinet or published on the internet for all to see. It's a scary thing to give away information. We should all be more grateful when we are given the opportunity to collect and use it.

(crossposted to LJ blog)

UPDATE: What about families who retain or hyphenate mother's names? Is the "mother's maiden name" question becoming outdated because of that phenomenon? I haven't set up any accounts that ask for that info in a while, but I mostly use the computer and numeric passcodes to get at my information nowadays. Perhaps I should call my bank.