What information do you collect?

The test a question has to pass is simple: something the agency published asks for it. If nothing does, we do not ask.

• Your name now and your new name, plus your name at birth and any other names you have used — the Social Security application asks for all of them.
• Your date of birth and where you were born. Items 4 and 5 of the SS-5.
• Your citizenship status, and the ethnicity, race and sex questions the SS-5 asks. Every one of those can be left unstated, and unstated is where they start.
• Your parents’ names, items 9.A and 10.A. This is the question people are least expecting.
• Where you live, a mailing address if your mail goes somewhere else, and a daytime phone number. Items 15 and 16, and several state forms print both addresses.
• What is printed on the document that changed your name: the date, the county and state that issued it, and a reference number if it has one.
• Your driver license or ID details, where your state’s form prints them.
• The organizations you want letters written to, with an optional account reference for each.

The questions only some people see

A handful of states ask things the others do not — height, weight, eye and hair color on a license application, or whether you have ever held a credential in that state. Those questions are shown only to people whose own state’s form asks them. A Floridian is never asked for their height, because there is no box in Florida that would hold it.

We also never want your documents. There is nothing to upload — no certificate, no decree, no order, no ID. We ask what is printed on the document; we never read it, and we never form a view about what it says.

Your answers are encrypted before they are written down, are never put in searchable columns or application logs, and are not used for analytics.