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What happens when the US runs out of SSNs?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Really?
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.