Personal Information Proxy

We all live in the Information Age, so filling out forms, whether online or off is inevitable. Writing in your name, address, date of birth, phone numbers and email is time consuming and prone to input errors. Since most of this information on you is a just a Google search away already, why not make it easier for you in your daily life? I propose a website that would issue a multi-digit code that would simply be a proxy to ones personal information. I believe that each person should have a twelve-digit ‘public’ code that could be written into a special box in a new form, or more likely in the “Name” section of an existing one. You could even add another shorter ‘private’ code for more sensitive data like, SS number, drivers license etc. The code could be typed (or scanned) into a machine-readable form and the pertinent information would be accessed automatically via a web site, say www.fillmyform.com. The biggest questions this raises aren’t technological – how many digits, can you use non-english characters etc., but social – security in particular. One protection factor would include sending to your designated account an immediate email asking you to authorize access to your information. In order to send the email, a person or organization asking for the information would have to log on to the system. A log would be kept of everyone trying to access your code and whether you authorized it or not. Any system can be rigged, and this certainly has privacy and Big Brother issues, but I believe that the convenience factor would outweigh them for a majority of users. As a business model, I believe that you could charge consumers to keep the code updated and sell credit report and credit card companies the advertising space.