this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Does it even have that many permutations when the first 3 and middle 2 are coded to actually mean something?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Norawy is facing a similar issue. Even though the national identification number is 11 digits, the first 6 are reserved for birth date. The 7th digit has some set of rules derived from which century the birth was (something like 5-9 is reserved for year 2000 and beyond). The 9th digit is even for women and odd for men. The 10th and 11th digit are fixed and derived from the rest of the numbers.

In conclusion, the system only leaves room for around 240 people per date of birth per gender (yes this system assumes 2 genders). So if the birth rate would have a spike, even just for a day, the system could be in trouble.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Could embiggen it by a factor of 10 by removing the gender marker.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Since the distribution of male/female is roughly 1:1, that wouldn't really do anything (except for positively being more accepting). The real solution would be to unlock one of the two last digits, but you can bet that a ton of systems will break as they validate those digits.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

It'd be easier for the government to start assigning new genders

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I don't know how you could possibly fit 999,999,999 people into an SSN, or even the entire current fleet of US SSNs. And I don't know how reusing numbers will help, given the time to build a new SSN. But it will undoubtedly be a disaster for the USN and the US. Hopefully, some of us outside the US, will be alive to make memes about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Maybe they can just add one digit, or start using A-F

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Social Security numbers are not unique identifiers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nope.

If you got your social Security number before 2011, your first three digits represent the geographical location you were born in. You share those three digits with each of your siblings who were born in the same geographical location before in 2011. Go ahead and ask them.

If memory serves, and all we would really need to do is check a Wikipedia article, the middle two digits were done in some weird sequence, and then the last four were pseudo-random.

So basically, any people receiving their social security number any multiple of 100 people apart from another (prior to 2011) in the same geographic location have a 1 in 10,000 chance of having identical social security numbers.

Basically, if you live in a large city, you definitely have a few twinsies out there.

This was changed in 2011, because of this, but it is still not a unique identifier. It's just more random.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This generally isn't true. The SSA makes an effort to assign a unique number to each individual. It's happened before where two people have accidentally gotten the same SSN, but they try to avoid this.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

An ID analytics study showed 40 million united states SSN had more than one name associated with them over a decade ago.

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/cross-industry-fraud-files/docs/financial/LexisNexis-Risk-Solutions-SSN-White-Paper.pdf

Whitepaper from LexisNexis, corporate background check company, explaining avout SSN not being a unique or even really reliable identifier

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That white paper was very uninformative lol. I see now rereading your comment that its wasnt meant to support your 40 mil claim. So I googled varius combinations of ID analytics, ssn, studies, and 40 million but couldn't find anything. I'm not that interested, I just wanted to read it tonsee if my gut feeling was correct. The funny thing is the white paper kinda outlined my gut feeling, that the 40 million count is wildly inaccurate demonstration of duplicate ssn's being issued. Rather I felt it was more of an indication of the rampant problem this country has with the amount of stolen identities that happen each year.

Do you have any direction you could point me in to read more about this douplicate ssn problem?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Idk dude, just googled "id analytics ssn" and I immediately get a page of results of articles from 2012-15. Could probably just add "as someone else" in scholar for the paper

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I guess i shouldve just asked where you pulled the 40 million from? Lol cuz that would mean 15% of the US is sharing ssn's and that seems super high.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The birth of the buffer overflow will mark the beginning of the apocalypse. Hold onto your gas, guns, and milk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I wish I was an overflow baby :-(

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

"When the Overflow was noticed, everyone started updating their systems. And this causes people to fall through the cracks. Usually those people are just written off, but what we do is we take those people for ourselves."

"So you're stealing people?"

"No we're not stealing people. They don't have SSNs so they aren't technically people?"

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