This is exactly the fantasy that we need to dispel, not rationalize.
Nobody steals your identity. You always have your identity, and nobody else ever does. Your identity is not the few pieces of trivia a criminal can easily discover about you.
The criminal never takes or has your identity. The bank is simply neglecting to correctly identify someone.
> steals that identity to abuse it
Criminals are not abusing your identity, they are abusing the banks' careless failure to correctly identify people.
> to abuse it and leave you with the baggage
The criminal is not leaving you with the baggage, the bank is. They use willfully inept processes, because they have tricked you into believing you should bear the responsibility for the consequences of their own hubris.
>Criminalizing the act of exploiting someone's shitty security reminds me of how banks transfer the responsibility for their failure to properly vet the identity of someone they loan money to by calling it "identity theft."
> Yeah, Identity theft is one of those crimes where the authorities don't really care.
There is no such thing as "identity theft". You can't steal who someone is, that's bullshit. It's rather some party not making sure it's actually you they are talking to, and then claiming that you are responsible for it anyway because they fell for someone else's scam.
Unless you think the idea is that are going to clone you, pod people style. Nobody can steal your identity, what they seek to do is defraud a bank or credit institution, you aren't really involved besides them incidentally using your name to do so. I wouldn't worry about it unless you get a bill or have something wrong on your credit report.
> I am tired of people calling me a "victim" of identity theft. I'm not the victim.
Usually, the person whose identity is stolen is the victin.
> The companies and government agencies that allowed themselves to be defrauded by someone posing as me are the victims.
They are also victims, but until you—often at considerable personal effort—have gotten all the debts and other bad marks by the fraudster dissociated from your identity, you are disadvantaged by it, and if you are disadvantaged or have had to pay a cost to escape that disadvantage, you are a victim, too.
> the term came from the banking sector themselves with the purpose of doing so
As far as I can see after a bit of research, that doesn't seem to be the case. Do you recall where you first heard that idea?
> No one has stolen any one's identity.
Nobody thinks that a victim of identity theft is left with no identity. It's figurative language just like your computer firewall isn't there to keep the flames back.
> Another concept that I don't understand is that USA's social security number has to be kept secret or otherwise your identity can be stolen. How that is even possible? Doesn't your employer needs it?
I think adopting this framing is what makes it really bad. Your identity cannot be stolen. The whole concept of "identity theft" is bullshit intented to shift blame. It only so happens that some entities are incompetent at verifying people's identity. That shouldn't even be your problem, as you have no influence whatsoever on how others check the identity of people, so you should not in any way be responsible for dealing with the consequences if someone thinks that you owe them something just because they believed someone else's claim that they were you.
This reminds me of a great Mitchell and Webb sketch. https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E
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