PG&E was publicly exposing partial SSN information of US consumers through its use of Experian Identity Verification questions.

I recently discovered PG&E will let you sign up for electricity online without providing your SSN. Their website offered an option for “Alternate Identification”, so I chose it and proceeded to sign up for service. The only thing required was your name, “alternate mailing address”(i.e. your current address), and a State ID, Passport or similar photo ID number as shown below.

--

--

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store