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.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
      18·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • yoevli@lemmy.worldEnglish
        63·
        2 months ago

        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.

          • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
            31·
            2 months ago

            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?

            • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
              2·
              2 months ago

              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

              • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
                31·
                2 months 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.