It all started with a podcast. A few months back, one of Brainstorm’s contributors, James Francis, wrote a review of Breach for our Off Duty section. The audio documentary’s first season focused on the Yahoo! hack, which opened my eyes to the scary and long-lasting ramifications such hacks could have on ordinary internet users’ online lives. However, the second season was about US credit bureau Equifax, which highlighted something that could affect people who had never agreed to their data being stored by Equifax or even heard of the firm – the leaking of their social security numbers.

Obviously, South Africa’s own centrally controlled identity number system is slightly different, but it got me thinking, just how valuable is a South African ID number?