Everyone and their g-d d-mn uncle has access to my social security information, yet I can’t make one simple change to my account online! 🤬

US government passes surprising tracking rule for millions of Social Security recipients. Will your movement be monitored?

Recently disclosed court filings from the Justice Department revealed that two members of a team affiliated with Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative early last year were working inside SSA while secretly communicating with a political advocacy group. That group was seeking to overturn election results in certain states, Politico reports. One individual reportedly signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to help match state voter rolls (4).

And, as Wired reported back in May, the Trump administration has been allowing the SSA, and other agencies, to share sensitive personal data with DHS for months. The data is to be used for targeting immigrants for visa enforcement or even deportation. The federal government recently made that data sharing official through a public notice (5).

Analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a progressive American think tank, suggests that agreement to share Social-Security data with immigration enforcement could give the agency access to sensitive data about more than 500 million people who have ever applied for a Social Security number. Some of this data could be outdated and riddled with errors, according to the CBPP, which expands the risk that some voters may be disenfranchised before the midterm elections in November 2026 (6).

To be clear, this latest DHS travel-tracking update — which is about surveilling Social Security recipients, not immigrants specifically — is separate from that, as far as we know. But all these incidents, taken together, lend weight to fears that sensitive SSA data could be misused, accessed improperly, or repurposed beyond its original intent.

Simply put, workers and retirees are being increasingly monitored by error-prone automated systems. If you’re uneasy about these developments, there are ways to protect yourself.