Reliance on documentary identification such as computer records, identification cards, and official papers is an essential feature of life in today's advanced industrial societies. This paper examines the history and use of six of the most common personal documents in the United States: Social Security cards, driver's licenses, credit cards, birth certificates, passports, and bank books. The increasing use and importance of such documents reflects the growth of new relationships between individuals and large, centralized organizations. These new relationships entail mass surveillance and social control, and result in increasing demands by organizations for personal data. We look at the strengths and weaknesses of these surveillance systems and the prospects of still greater social control in the future. A distinctive feature of advanced industrial societies is the importance of personal documentation in relations between individuals and organizations. By personal documentation we mean two things: (1) the identification cards, certifications, licenses, and other organizationally generated tokens of identity held by private individuals; and (2) the data on persons developed by organizations and stored in computers or files for use in dealing with these people. These two forms of personal documentation usually work together: issuance or use of the first requires creation of, or recourse to, the second. Together, the two structure ongoing exchanges of information between persons and organizations which, we argue, bear importantly on the interests of both parties. Many social scientists have studied these exchanges and expressed concern about their effects upon individual privacy and autonomy (Rule, 1974; Rule et al., 1980; Shils, 1975; Westin, 1967; Westin and Baker, 1972; Wheeler, 1969). Social scientists are not the only ones to note the growing impact of personal documentation. It is practically impossible for an adult to live in the United States without frequent recourse to such things. One finding of our research underscores this fact: in 1976 and 1977 we surveyed 192 randomly selected households in Brookhaven Town, New York, and found an average of 28.8 different kinds of personal documents per household. The documents most often reported were Social Security cards, insurance policies, driver's licenses, birth certificates, personal checks, insurance payment records, marriage licenses, insurance identification cards, bank statements, tax returns, and savings passbooks. Social Security cards, the most widely held of these, were reported in 98 percent of the households; savings passbooks, the least widely held, were reported in 87 percent. When documents such as these are lost or accidently destroyed, the resulting in