Congratulations! It’s a bouncing bundle of paranoid fantasy! The first crazy fear of 2015 goes to three Virginia hospitals. According to the Richmond Times Dispatch:
In a joint statement released Tuesday, Bon Secours Richmond Health System, HCA Virginia and VCU Medical Center have said they will not announce the first birth of 2015 as a safety precaution and to protect families’ privacy.
It’s a trend, with more hospitals around the country declining to announce the first baby of the year for similar reasons.
“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has cautioned against these announcements due to potential risk of abduction or identify theft. While the first birth of the New Year is a celebrated event, we jointly feel we must protect our patients and their children from unnecessary exposure,” the joint statement from the local hospitals said.
Has this EVER happened: A baby stolen from a hospital because someone read the name of a child born there in a “First Baby of (fill in the year)!” announcement?
I can, of course, find zero cases of this.
This is scraping the bottom of the boogeyman barrel even while posturing as compassionate and wise. And so we welcome 2015, knowing there is Free-Range work to be done.
Happy New Year’s! – L
59 Comments
“In a joint statement released Tuesday, Bon Secours Richmond Health System, HCA Virginia and VCU Medical Center …”
What??!! They actually released the names of the hospitals? Now people will know there are babies there and go steal them!
To heck with them. If I had the first baby born, I would be calling the reporters and papers myself, then. They cannot stop you.
If families want their privacy protected, they have every right to tell the hospital not to announce the names already. As a safety precaution, this is ridiculous. There is no trail here for identity theft for the parents that isn’t already there on Whitepages.com, and I don’t really think there’s any benefit in stealing a newborn’s identity — do they have bank accounts and credit cards? And the abduction thing is just silly. The very occasional people who want to steal newborn babies, go to the hospital (where everyone knows there are babies there even if they don’t announce the family’s name in the paper) or stalk pregnant women, which you don’t need a newspaper story to do.
In other news, number of hospital births decline due to abduction concerns…
Stupid. In other news, I have a picture of my daughter almost identical to that one. I wasn’t wearing socks when she was born, though.
@pentamom, actually there are benefits in child identity theft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theft#Child_identity_theft
“The Social Security numbers of children are valued because they do not have any information associated with them. Thieves can establish lines of credit, obtain driver’s licenses, or even buy a house using a child’s identity. This fraud can go undetected for years, as most children do not discover the problem until years later.”
How does this make a baby safer? Maternity wards are full of babies 365 days a year. And it’s not hard to find someone with a new baby, even if it’s not announced anywhere.
As for identity theft, I guess no one should ever publicly disclosed their birthday. “Sorry Bobby, no birthday parties for you! Someone might steal your identity!”
@bsolar
“The Social Security numbers of children are valued because they do not have any information associated with them.”
Uh, not even the date of birth? You’d think there’d be some difficulty buying a house or obtaining a driver’s license as a two-week-old.
@BL, you can find more information here: http://www.idtheftcenter.org/Fact-Sheets/fs-120.html
“What most people do not understand is that credit issuers do not always verify the age of the applicant. The information on the application is typically taken at face value. Few credit issuers request sufficient proof of identity. This is a fault within our system that needs to be rectified.
A second misconception is that the credit reporting agencies (CRAs) will know that an application is fraudulent because the applicant is a minor. The age of the applicant for a credit reporting agency becomes “official” with the first credit application. For example, if the first application indicates that the applicant is 24, the credit agencies will believe that person is 24 until a dispute is filed and proven.
Criminal identity theft occurs when a person steals the information of the minor to get a driver’s license or uses the child’s identity when caught in a criminal act. This person may be an undocumented worker who bought the information or a relative who has had a license suspended or revoked.”
I think it should be up to the parents. I feel like the parents have the right to not want it announced for whatever reason and that should be respected. If it was me, I am not so sure I would want it in the paper. Just because I have some family that I don’t want knowing about us for good reason. I also am a private person. I did not do a baby announcement or the stork sign in the yard or any of that stuff.
But if the parents are fine with it and agree to have it printed then print away.
>>To heck with them. If I had the first baby born, I would be calling the reporters and papers myself, then. They cannot stop you.<<
@Warren–I know what you meant, but this still sounded funny. If YOU delivered the first baby of 2015, you'd probably get several newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles, plus at least one made-for-TV movie, and possibly even a reality TV show.
You should do a top ten for the year!
Protect patients and children from unnecessary exposure to anxiety and paranoia.
Birth the babies at home, best not to expose them to the baby snatchers at the hospital and all those prying eyes. You can never be too safe with the babies. Remember always that that wondrous new life your brought in the world has a target on it’s little knit cap that attracts all the boogeymen and live your life with darting eyes to always be aware of snatchers. But please stay awake first because you will be exhausted never taking your eyes off of them.
Honestly, I feel like I need to protect myself from the unnecessary exposure to this ridiculous organization that claims to protect children. The first birth of the year used to be celebrated and happy news, now it’s just another irrational fear to add to the ever growing list. Grrr.
I suppose it would be too hard to just ask the parents if they want the birth announced or not?
I understand the concerns, but personally I would think a newspaper announcement would be kind of fun for the kid to have.
‘This is scraping the bottom of the boogeyman barrel’
Just when I thought we already hit it, we reach another level. It looks like it’s bottomless. What an I opener! I just told my family about this. I expected to see rolled eyes and shaking heads. Instead I heard comments that sound like agreement!
I suddenly thought of the movie, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. I was surprised and thought, Oh no! Not you too!
This made me chuckle. My daughter was born in one of these hospitals and during our stay, the infant abduction alarm was accidentally triggered in our room. It took 5 full minutes for anyone to respond. You’d think they’d get the basics in order before they started worrying about silly scenarios like this.
I think my parents did birth announcements in the newspaper for both me and my brother, and neither one of us was the first anything of anything. But, the entire concept of “Don’t announce the first baby of the year, because kidnappers!!!” is stupid, because how is anyone going to sneak into a monitored hospital, into a locked maternity ward, and successfully make it out of the hospital with someone else’s baby in hand, without either setting off some kind of alarm, or causing the baby to scream the place down?
What about swing sets, sandboxes, trampolines, and other children’s playthings that *announce* you have children?
Gosh, owning strollers and infant carriers are just tempting the fates.
I’m shocked no one has designed an infant concealing devise that makes your baby look like a large loaf of bread to deter those pesky abductors.
“Is that a baby?”
“NO! It’s organic Ciabatta. Nothing to see here.”
@lollipoplover “…no one has designed an infant concealing devise that makes your baby look like a large loaf of bread…”
I am a business idea broker and this is so going on my list.
“The Social Security numbers of children are valued because they do not have any information associated with them.”
That is true, and if the hospitals are publishing the social security numbers of the first baby born each year, they should stop. You need more than just the name and date of birth to get the social security number. It is certainly doable, but a good bit of work. And, frankly, I’ve nothing to indicate that first babies of the year are any more or less likely to have their identity stolen than 2nd babies of the year or 100,000th babies of the year.
@Donna, actually trying to guess the SSN was found to be relatively easy by knowing birthday and place of birth: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf+html?sid=f655da07-5374-4129-afe3-a09ba3f3fe69
“Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.”
I say “was” because the paper is relatively old (2009), so I hope that by today the suggested mitigation measures were implemented.
bsolar – CAN BE is certainly not is. A bunch of egg-heads sitting around predicting social security numbers is not actually the same as CRIMINALS sitting around and accurately guessing social security numbers. You clearly have an elevated sense of criminals if you believe that is happening in large amounts. It is a just another rabbit hole of minuscule fear being paraded as something likely to happen. Again, I haven’t seen a single statistic that shows that a baby whose birth in announced in the paper (which has been happening for generations) has a higher likelihood of identity fraud than a baby whose birth wasn’t announced.
This is stupid, but I’ve also never cared for the “first baby of the year” announcements.
This is total madness. Such a societal disappointment! Come on people. Breathe and let it go…
@Donna, I’m more oriented towards computer security and I guarantee you criminals are very sophisticated in their hacks: it’s also not unusual for a security researcher to discover a security hole and to find that it’s actually being already exploited in the wild. So I would not be surprised at all to find criminals actually trying to guess SSNs…
You are right that an exploit being possible doesn’t mean that you’re going to be targeted, but it’s important to know that you are potentially at risk in the first place. They key part is to evaluate the risk and not to blow it out of proportion, but It would be ingenuous to believe there is no risk at all just as it would be ingenuous to believe that everyone is out to exploit your personal informations.
The first baby of the year was born on the Christmas Island or Samoa when it’s still early morning 31st in the USA. What they should announce is people who have two seperate births in one year. That’s a far larger acomplishment. It’s a hospital, there will be babies. Are they also anouncing the first toncil removement of the year? First cardiac arrest? Will there be preditors out for the first of the year? Like it’s herring season in the netherlands. The first barrel makes the best price!! You are waiting for the first of the season to debone and eat raw. They will be so tender and fatty and fresh… The herring that is. And what about the last of the year? That’s just backwash? Weird all around.
With Samoa being the first place to ring in the New Year and A. Samoa being the last, I imagine that the Samoans frequently can lay claim to both the first and last babies born in any year.
If you can get a driver’s license or credit on a baby’s social security number, something is wrong with the system. Don’t they link that number to a name and age before those documents are provided?
“What they should announce is people who have two seperate births in one year. That’s a far larger acomplishment.”
Or a twin born in two separate years…
It’s spreading. Happy New Fear.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/first-baby-of-2015-its-a-secret-in-many-places/ar-BBhoPsU?ocid=DELLDHP
@Ben, that’s exactly the point. Most assume the system is well designed and safe. In reality the system is broken: you just need to read my comment above in reply to BL to realize that. This means a normal person won’t realize the risk exist, because they (wrongly) assume the system would not allow for it.
If these computer hacking criminals are so good at their jobs, why do they have to wait until a “first baby” is announced in the media? Why can’t they just hack into the hospital’s computer system and grab all the new baby info they want?
Okay, fine. Babies’ identity can be stolen.
So therefore, no baby’s name should ever appear in the media anywhere, at any time, for any reason.
If you’re not going to insist on that, then this is a silly policy.
@Flurry: they do attemp and sometimes manage to collect data from hospital systems: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530411/hackers-are-homing-in-on-hospitals/
“one recently announced theft involved data from 4.5 million people who had received treatment from Community Health Systems (CHS), a company that runs more than 200 hospitals.”
This doesn’t mean they don’t attemp anything else. Said that, I agree that you will most likely never be targeted as individual: the risk is in bulk data collection from computer systems or through automatized scavenging algorithms operating on public informations (social networks). If the name and birthdate of the newborn are made public on the local newspaper, I bet nobody will attemp anything strange. The info being made public on internet is a different story, because there hackers can attemp to collect the data automatically “en masse”.
@pentamom, that’s like saying that you should not play with a sling since it increases the risk of an accident. It’s a fact that the increased risk exists: how much you care about it or how much you want it to influence your decisions is up to your own judgement.
In this case an increased risk of identity theft exists: whether it’s enough to convince you to go completely anonymous or insignificant enough to ignore the issue completely is up to you.
Typo above: I meant swing, not sling…
To steal an identity, you need a social security number. I work at the social security administration. We’ve gotten very efficient over the years but not so efficient that we are issuing ss numbers to babies straight out of the womb.
bsolar – This is no more than a speculative risk. Even though the article was 5 years ago, there is still no indication that their theories have moved into reality. This is no different than altering your life because of the myriad of other speculative things that we can dream up in our minds. It is also 100% possible that some mentally off person could see the first baby of the new year, decide it was their baby, track down the baby and kidnap it. That it has never happened doesn’t make it impossible. One completely speculative, no proof it has ever actually occurred in real life risk is not more valid than another.
That is not to say that I deny that a babies can have their identity stolen. It is rare, but it happens. That is why you should take normal precautions with your child’s social security number and periodically check your child’s credit report. But still there isn’t a single shred of evidence to show that names published in the paper make you any more likely than never having your name in the paper. Yes, we can dream up a million ways that criminals MAY do things with a birth announcement, but that doesn’t make them a reality.
@tdr – I think that I got my child’s social security card within 4-6 weeks of birth. Not that I think this is even a remotely reasonable thing to worry about concerning birth announcements, but I don’t think the lag time is enough to prevent it if someone was so inclined.
@Donna, every risk by definition is only speculative: risk is the *potential* of something bad happening. I also never advised to change your life based on this: if you believe the risk is insignificant enough by all means, go ahead with your life as you see fit. This is true with all the “myriad speculative things” you were talking about: usually it’s not that there is no risk at all, only that the risk can be considered insignificant enough to ignore it.
@tdr, do you happen to know if the problem I mentioned above was ultimately mitigated? http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf+html?sid=f655da07-5374-4129-afe3-a09ba3f3fe69
Lenore’s blog is becoming a great place to find nominees for the annual Shiitake Awards, an award for the dumbest sex-offender-related story of the year.
Lenore should make a similar award show for dumbest helicopter parenting story of the year. She can even send the winners trophies… wrapped in bubble wrap, of course.
Maybe the award should be bubblewrap.
“In this case an increased risk of identity theft exists: whether it’s enough to convince you to go completely anonymous or insignificant enough to ignore the issue completely is up to you.”
And the hospital systems (I read about another one doing the same thing just a couple of days ago) should realize that it’s insignificant enough to ignore the issue completely. If parents are worried about it, they can opt out. There’s no reason for the hospital systems to act like it’s a real risk when it’s not, though.
Here is the announcement from my paper. http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2015/01/01/3338279/first-baby-of-2015-born-at-trios.html?sp=/99/177/&ihp=1
I am glad they don’t give in to the hysteria. The link was posted in my Face Book feed by several different people, none related to the baby, most just happy to see a happy healthy baby.
The first baby is usually born in NZ Nadine, though maybe it is Western Samoa now they are in our time zone too. Not that it matters. …a baby is a blessing regardless 😊.
The first baby of the Millennium was actually in a bit of trouble medically, which was how they were born first…it’s not always such a great thing to be first….
Birth announcements are “dangerous”, yet hospitals subject 33% of mothers and babies to cesarean section, many (but not all) of which are unnecessary and risk the lives of mother and child among plethora other risks. Let’s get our priorities straight medical institutions! But don’t get me started on one of my favorite rants.
For the above reason and not because of birth announcement fear, Happy Home Birthday to my darling, joyful, loving six year old Reuben born early January 1st.
“The first baby of the Millennium was actually in a bit of trouble medically, which was how they were born first…it’s not always such a great thing to be first….”
Well, logically, that child would have been emergency delivered at any given possible time as soon as its danger was known and everything was prepared. It’s no more likely to happen at 12:01 a.m. on January 1 than any other time — less likely, in fact, since there are so many minutes in the day and night. Had a few details been different in how the mother sensed the problem and the situation was diagnosed and the delivery team called in and prepped, that child would have been born some time earlier or later and not been the “first.” He wasn’t first because he was in medical trouble, he was born that night because of that. Another child could as well have been first nonetheless.
Today’s paper has a write up on the whole family – including the three siblings of the first baby of the year. All a pictured on the front page of the paper.
@bsolar,
Just for the sake of arguement, let’s go with your stance that there are hordes of expert hackers out there just stealing the identies of babies.
Do you not think they would advoid using famous babies such as those celebrated for being the first born? Like any other criminal, would they not want to avoid any high attention targets? Or are they computer brilliant and common sense stupid?
Sorry pentamom, usually feel like I understand what you mean, but am lost here. Probably wasn’t making sense myself 😀.
Not sure why I mentioned the Millennium baby really. …just that there was some worries at the time (seeing the first Millenium baby would obviously be born here) that people would attempt to circumvent nature and get ‘c-sectioned’ at the right moment (a practice that should lead to sectioning of another type. ..why anyone would be allowed, or want, to have a c-section without good medical reason is beyond me).
In the end though that proved to be a non-issue; the baby was born then because he absolutely needed to be, and is never mentioned that I can recall, except maybe in 2010, his family having presumably chosen anonymity.
As for whether the mum could have worked out whether he was in trouble earlier, am not sure how that works? Personally I would never have known if a child I was pregnant with was in difficulty in the womb…did you? That’s a genuine question….I never have been that great at working out what was going on with my own body (felt marvelous with toxiciaemia, didn’t work out I was pregnant with number 3 until 21 weeks in). Should this woman have known the baby was in trouble? 😕
@Warren, my stance is not that there are “hordes” of hackers, only that there *are* hackers. I never claimed that they pose a high enough risk that you have to act. As I wrote before evaluating the risk itself and deciding if and how to act is up to you, but I dare say it’s better to evaluate it by knowing that child identities are valued instead of evaluating it with the false assumption that child identities are worthless to criminals, which was the original question of pentamom.
About the babies celebrated, I doubt they end up as being famous enough to qualify as “high attention targets”, not to mention that if the true identity would matter then the age check alone would stop most abuses. On top of that an eventual hacker collecting the data is more likely to sell it than use it personally.
Kid’s identities do get abused from time to time. I am sure that my daughter’s friend will have a hard time getting credit or college loans because her mother used her name to get utilities that mom ended up not paying for. I suspect that this is the most common form of identity theft for kids.
Less common was a friend who took her 6 year old to open a bank account and found that some 40 year old guy was using her social security number and that she couldn’t open her bank account until things got straightened out. All it took for that was a guess at a number….not even a guess at the correct age or anything.
The whole someone using your child’s SS number is again like abductions or molestation more likely to happen from someone you know than a stranger. Most cases of it are a grandparent or aunt or uncle or parent finding out the SS number and then using it to get credit. Its the people you know you often can’t trust. At least if the people you know are deadbeats.
Thus why my children’s SS numbers are not given out to family members.
What really frustrates me is you can check your credit report for free every year but you are not able to check a child’s credit report to make sure nothing is on there. That makes no sense. My son’s medical info was stolen by hackers from a doctor’s office and pretty much they only gave us a year of credit checking on him. But the hackers can probably just wait a year and then be free to do whatever they want and there is nothing I can do about it till he is 18 and then we might find out there was someone using it all this time. Its infuriating.
I can’t imagine a situation in which any of my family members (none of whom are deadbeats), would want, need, or ask for my kids Social Security numbers.
“What really frustrates me is you can check your credit report for free every year but you are not able to check a child’s credit report to make sure nothing is on there. ”
I’m not sure how all of this works, but how could that be the case? If you have the child’s number, how is that you can’t just use it to check in the same way you would use your own? You don’t have to do it in person, so why can’t you just do it for your child?
hineata, I admit that was a little convoluted.
I don’t mean that particular mom could have done things differently, I just mean that it was pure happenstance that needing to be born at that time made him the first. It’s not that there’s a logical connection between needing to be emergency delivered, and having it happen at 12:01 a.m. on 01/01/01. His particular circumstances made it negative, but being the first of the millennium did not contribute to the negativity.
CrazyCatLady — same here. Full write up and fully family pictures of first baby at each of our two major hospitals.
pentamom: they just won’t let you do it. I have tried multiple times. I entered the name and number and birthdate and they give you a message about not being able to due to their age. Because of that data breach they are allowing his to be monitored specially but otherwise no, that is normally not allowed. It makes no sense. If I want to continue to monitor it I have to pay for a premium service that will alert me if anything happens on his report but even then you can’t view his credit score or view every detail on it, they just kinda will monitor it for you.
Its absurd. We should either be able to check on their reports or just keep their reports shut down till the day they turn 18 so nothing can be done on it period.
Flurry: well I was reading a parenting mag and they said an untrustworthy deadbeat relative in this one woman’s case lied and said she needed it to set up a savings account for the kid which she would deposit money for the child’s college and in reality she just took out credit on the kid. It was a mother in law.
So that was her telling her story in order to warn others from falling for that trick.
They can be tricky about it and say its for bank stuff or inheritance stuff but I am not giving it out to anyone period as far as relatives go. Its a shame I can’t trust relatives, but it is what it is.
And in England, the BOS (Sunday paper delivered through door) has got a teeny weeny article on the first few babies of 2015. It’s prety much Name, Sex, Weight and Time of birth. First baby was a girl at 6:22 am 1st Jan.
So there’s that? We’re sane, at least. No-one’s putting ID numbers out there or anything.
Ah, thanks, SOA, so it’s actually that there’s an age limit on the process itself. That is odd.