You’re going to put your kid on Facebook with all their privacy problems?

They may not be able to walk, but they have an email address and will probably end up with a Facebook page. According to antivirus maker AVG, 7 percent of children as young as six months have an email address, and by the time they reach two they have a digital footprint. And therein lays the problem. Identity thieves steal the Social Security numbers of newborns and use them for illegal purposes. The child, or his or her family, knows nothing about it until they try to use the SS card, which could be years.

This kind of theft is heavily used by illegal immigrants; in Arizona alone it has been estimated that 1 million children are victims of identity theft. Call me an alarmist, but I predict with the right amount of information given on a social network (name and address is sufficient, but many will provide a birth date), there will be an increase in infant identity theft in the future.

Read more here and here.