Click here for a link to the news article. So, apparently, if you know a persons birth date and other basic information, and you know these general rules of thumb, you can guess what their social security number is.
"The researchers at Carnegie Mellon set out to see if they could discover people's numbers by first exploiting what is publicly known about how the numbers are derived.
The Social Security number's first three digits -- called the "area number" -- is issued according to the Zip code of the mailing address provided in the application form. The fourth and fifth digits -- known as the "group number" -- transition slowly, and often remain constant over several years for a given region. The last four digits are assigned sequentially.
As a result, SSNs assigned in the same state to applicants born on consecutive days are likely to contain the same first four or five digits, particularly in states with smaller populations and rates of birth.
As it happens, the researchers said, if you're trying to discover a living person's SSN, the best place to start is with a list of dead people -- particularly deceased people who were born around the time and place of your subject. The so-called "Death Master File," is a publicly available file which lists SSNs, names, dates of birth and death, and the states of all individuals who have applied for a number and whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration. "
Considering that when SSNs were brought into use, it wasn't as an identification measure, it's easy to see how there's such a very large flaw in something so extremely important in today's world.
""For reasons unrelated to this report, the agency has been developing a system to randomly assign SSNs," which should make it more difficult to discover numbers in the future, Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said by e-mail.
Introduced in the 1930s as a way to track individuals for taxation purposes, Social Security numbers were never designed to be used for authentication. Over time, however, private and public institutions began keeping tabs on consumers using the numbers, requiring people to present them as proof of identity, such as when applying for loans, new employment, or health insurance. "
Luckily, and if you read the article you'll know this, even if someone is particularly wonderful at guessing - if you were born in a highly populated area, where many people were born at the same time, you've got luck and people will most likely not be able to guess your numbers.
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