A year and a half ago, I ranted here against an unlikely, or perhaps rarely recognized, combination between the government and corporate sectors against the little guy. In that case, it was the government’s tax-reporting regime and entertainment industry behemoth Ticketmaster uniting in an inscrutable attack on financial privacy. It’s time for an update! Because an utterly predictable risk to financial security has materialized. Yet the system is undaunted. Ticketmaster is again holding on to my money as a result of my pesky insistence on being something other than a cog in corporate and governmental machinery.

Full of meta-commentary about the experiences of elites and plebes, my post, The Double Bureaucracy vs. Privacy, recounted how Ticketmaster was holding a small amount of my money—proceeds from selling tickets at a loss—because I was not giving the company my Social Security number (SSN). “Let that sink in for a moment,” I wrote, “Ticketmaster . . . SSN. Duck . . . bicycle.” There is an elaborate system of incentives, I surmised, that drives entities like Ticketmaster to demand this information, though my transactions that year weren’t reportable even under the IRS’s current intrusive transaction reporting regime.

One of the results of having personal financial data where it isn’t needed is the small but real aggregate risk of financial crimes including “identity theft,” better deemed identity fraud. I check my statements carefully to control my money and such risk, so I could write:

I’m actually not terribly worried about the risks of identity fraud from having my SSN in another database. I might even think of Ticketmaster’s SSN demand as an inchoate offer of free credit monitoring services when, in the not too distant future, its database of customer information is breached.

Earlier this month I got some news from Ticketmaster. It’s as if they read that blog post.

We are writing to notify you of a data security incident that may have involved your personal information. We take the protection of your personal information very seriously and are sending this correspondence to tell you what happened, what information was involved, what we have done, and what you can do to address this situation.

And there, after lengthy advisories about protecting myself, is my offer of free credit services.

To further protect your identity and as a precaution, we are also offering you identity monitoring with TransUnion at no cost to you. Identity monitoring will look out for your personal data on the dark web and provide you with alerts for 1 year from the date of enrollment if your personally identifiable information is found online. These services will be provided by Cyberscout, a TransUnion company specializing in fraud assistance and remediation services.

My earlier post discusses the policies, actors, and incentives that produce a thing I think of as “public policy metastasis.” A bad policy sets in motion a whole host of responses in government and out that accrue as warp and bloat in various unlikely places.

Here the basic policy is too high a tax burden, itself a product of metastatic incentives in democracy and government. Congressional budget procedures (“pay-fors”) make it so that more aggressive tax reporting obligations allow passage of a bill with increased spending. The increase in tax reporting, as I previously discussed, requires or causes a company to collect financial information even when there is no actual reporting obligation. Once the data is predictably breached, overcooked data breach regulations plus corporate PR incentives make a commercial opportunity for TransUnion and its product, Cyberscout.

I’d rather just have lower taxes.

The “policy metastasis” metaphor works pretty well. Policy metastasis weakens the body politic. I don’t think it kills us, except on the margins by which our country grows too economically weak to meet geopolitical challenges or too frustrated to sustain our democratic form of government. Both of these challenges are on our nearer horizon than I thought they would be in my lifetime.

I sold some tickets again this year. Ticketmaster has emailed me eight times asking for my SSN, before, during, and after its recent data breach. So far, as before, its requests have been unavailing.

All this could be making a mountain out of a molehill—a federal case out of a minor inconvenience. Why not just hand over my data? Over millions or billions of instances, I think, small privacy and security losses through these insinuating encroachments add up to something substantial. In making nitpicking a way of life, I am working to preserve our way of life.

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