If you don't apply for credit, it's harder to pull a credit report on you. The public record portion of a credit report is also not comprehensive - they only obtain easily gathered public information (and are usually only interested in bankruptcy and felony findings). For example, my wife's name change is not recorded in her credit report. Hence the small city, and the recommendation to use cash, not debt. The alternate names section typically relies on you obtaining credit under the new name, using the same SSN.
Your SSN is only going to really be used for a very specific set of instances - most frequently job related (and then protected by a number of laws).
There will always be a trail for someone to follow, but as long as you don't have someone with the resources of the government looking for you, the trail will be very hard to follow.
> There will always be a trail for someone to follow, but as long as you don't have someone with the resources of the government looking for you, the trail will be very hard to follow.
I think you vastly underestimate private, paid access to these databases. Lexis-Nexis comes to mind, for one.
Your SSN is only going to really be used for a very specific set of instances - most frequently job related (and then protected by a number of laws).
There will always be a trail for someone to follow, but as long as you don't have someone with the resources of the government looking for you, the trail will be very hard to follow.