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.
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.
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