QUOTE (Tiny Deev @ Aug 27 2010, 05:31 PM)

I always imagined knowing someones SIN could quite litteraly give you everything there is to know about this guy, even where he is right now. Commercials specially tailored to your history. If you rent "T&A, tits and ammo" and like watching Roadhouse till 4 in the morning, a corps wouldn't want to waste precious indoctrination time, excuse me, I mean advertisment time on those 'lady scented body washes'.
I would easily use this if I worked at a pizza place. You like 5 pouds of beefed jerky this year? Try our two for one-and a half American Meat Lovers pizza, only 50% extra.
If I ran the show, everything would be customized to your needs specifically.
There are a lot of options for this in SR, having custom tailored information. It's similar to what we have already, where you have custom browsing ads based on cookies and the like. Places like Amazon 'You may also like this and this'.
But the SIN access would be dependant on the position and requirements in my mind, anyway. A pizza place will know their food allergies, their address and phone number, maybe have an option to do an automatic withdrawl from their account with a confirmation code, like we do today with credit cards. But they wouldn't need to know the guy's wife's birthday, or the fact that he goes to Yoga on the weekends or things of that nature.
However, other places, like the Internal Corporate Services can examine your SIN backwards and forwards and upside down, legally. Take a look at the short story Spew, the character examines a person's profile and finds out all sorts of details about them. It's much like working in a callcenter. Loss Prevention can look at credit checks, address history, etc, but your average sales agent doesn't know you from Adam.
Now, illegally, sure a decker could do a lot of things with someone's SIN. And if someone wanted to, they could attempt to get someone's SIN number and do things to it, but I would imagine security would be more advanced in SR as well. Rather than tell you the SIN number or the personal details, it tells you whether the information matches the account or not. Think of having a credit card without any numbers on it. You slide it through the reader, enter a code, and the merchant's terminal tells you whether it went through or not.
Anyway, as for the original topic, making things more cyberpunk can be done in a lot of ways. The big issues are usually the overwhelming access to information (anyone can suddenly look up the details on the primary food eaten in a country around the world if they wanted), the dystopia in the seperation of society in a tiered structure (and also the general distancing from each other), and also the interaction between man and machine (what do you give up to become better? Johnny 'Just Johnny' Mnemonic gave up his childhood for brain implants).
However, don't forget that cyberpunk is also about the punk culture, the underworld and rebellious attitude, the going against the 'man' and forging your own way. It's why CP2020 did so well with non-runner archetypes like newscaster, rocker and nomad in my eyes. You could play an independant journalist, out to expose the coverups for the people, you could play a musician looking for inspiration or extra money (1980's had a show called 'The Fall Guy', where Lee Majors played a stuntman who would do sidejobs as a bounty hunter), or you could play someone travelling across country, no solid home, just doing odd jobs here and there to make a living rather than give in and hold down a steady job. It's not just about being a criminal, it's about being different, rebelling in your own way to the norm and making people think. Maybe your journalist is like Dr. Jak, an in-your-face tabloid style reporter (Even would 'spin' the news, looking away from something saying 'If I didn't see it, you didn't see it'), or maybe your musician after Rickenharp in John Shirley's Freezone short story, or maybe your nomad is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu: The Legend Continues wandering the earth without destination because he has nothing better to do.