In North America, knowing someone’s SSN is a big step toward being able to steal his identity. You’d be surprised how many things you can do over here in someone else’s name just by giving his SSN.
SSN is something I understand only in part, as well as identity theft (not common at all where I used to live), even if I have been living for a while in US.
I mean, why do they use it so much with identification purposes, if it is so delicate? And what is done to prevent identity theft, in addition to suggesting you not to use SSN, to find out that you are required to use it, even if legally not necessary (see opening a bank account, which formally should not require a SSN, but in practise, most accounts are “SSN-driven”).
We have something similar to SSN in Italy (we call it “fiscal code”, and it groups now our fiscal and health care information, being valid, for the second purpose Europe-wide), but there is no need to keep it secret (it can actually be obtained easily from people name, birth of date, and some other info, and there are softwares to check the authenticity), since it is *not* a valid way to identify you. If you want to open a bank account or do some other activity, the code is only one of the (two) things you need, since a valid ID has to be presented and associated to the code itself, and there are easy ways to check if the two match.
I’m still wondering why something similar wasn’t implemented in US, but maybe I just don’t know this is done.
Well it is easy enough to find your DOB and I imagine with a little more work your place of birth. As SSNs are allocated non-randomly I wouldn’t count on your SSN being secure. At least you were born well before the 1980s when SSNs became much more predictable.
SSNs are insecure and that fact won’t change no matter how many laws they pass requiring bussinesses to protect them.
“”Ranges of values” means that the predictions are based on statistical inferences: in general, the first 5 digits can be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy with a single attempt – especially for individuals born after 1988 and in less populous states. In some cases, we were able predict the whole 9 digits of individual SSNs at the very first attempt. More often, the predictions produce windows of values that are likely to include the actual 9 digits. These windows can be very large (and, therefore, inaccurate) for certain years and states (for instance, for individuals born in California in 1973), but can get very narrow (and therefore more concerning, in terms of identity theft risks) for smaller states and recent years (for instance, 1 out of 20 SSNs of individuals born in DE in 1996 in our dataset could be identified with just 10 or fewer attempts per SSN).”
FriendlyNigerian on 4 June 2010 at 1:23 am
Wow,, this is amazing work! May I knwo the your SSN so that I can may confirm this? I would like want see this for my self. Thankyou.
/s
Oli on 4 June 2010 at 1:42 am
Nice, now Google knows your SSN!
dustym on 4 June 2010 at 2:15 am
Ugh. I’m not so lucky.
antimonio on 4 June 2010 at 2:34 am
What’s the point? I may be living under a rock, but I don’t know why that would be bad? (Mine is googlable, why should I be sad?)
ben on 4 June 2010 at 1:14 pm
In North America, knowing someone’s SSN is a big step toward being able to steal his identity. You’d be surprised how many things you can do over here in someone else’s name just by giving his SSN.
Igor on 4 June 2010 at 2:46 am
ethana2 on 4 June 2010 at 6:15 am
I started typing mine, but it suggested yours, and I clicked it.
No results, just like you said. *whew*
Nat Friedman on 4 June 2010 at 12:33 pm
Ha!
Alberto on 4 June 2010 at 1:20 pm
SSN is something I understand only in part, as well as identity theft (not common at all where I used to live), even if I have been living for a while in US.
I mean, why do they use it so much with identification purposes, if it is so delicate? And what is done to prevent identity theft, in addition to suggesting you not to use SSN, to find out that you are required to use it, even if legally not necessary (see opening a bank account, which formally should not require a SSN, but in practise, most accounts are “SSN-driven”).
We have something similar to SSN in Italy (we call it “fiscal code”, and it groups now our fiscal and health care information, being valid, for the second purpose Europe-wide), but there is no need to keep it secret (it can actually be obtained easily from people name, birth of date, and some other info, and there are softwares to check the authenticity), since it is *not* a valid way to identify you. If you want to open a bank account or do some other activity, the code is only one of the (two) things you need, since a valid ID has to be presented and associated to the code itself, and there are easy ways to check if the two match.
I’m still wondering why something similar wasn’t implemented in US, but maybe I just don’t know this is done.
zeta on 4 June 2010 at 2:30 pm
I hope you used the HTTPS version, https://www.google.com/
Nat Friedman on 4 June 2010 at 2:33 pm
Good point! I did.
Alan on 4 June 2010 at 4:09 pm
Well it is easy enough to find your DOB and I imagine with a little more work your place of birth. As SSNs are allocated non-randomly I wouldn’t count on your SSN being secure. At least you were born well before the 1980s when SSNs became much more predictable.
SSNs are insecure and that fact won’t change no matter how many laws they pass requiring bussinesses to protect them.
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/ssnstudy/
“”Ranges of values” means that the predictions are based on statistical inferences: in general, the first 5 digits can be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy with a single attempt – especially for individuals born after 1988 and in less populous states. In some cases, we were able predict the whole 9 digits of individual SSNs at the very first attempt. More often, the predictions produce windows of values that are likely to include the actual 9 digits. These windows can be very large (and, therefore, inaccurate) for certain years and states (for instance, for individuals born in California in 1973), but can get very narrow (and therefore more concerning, in terms of identity theft risks) for smaller states and recent years (for instance, 1 out of 20 SSNs of individuals born in DE in 1996 in our dataset could be identified with just 10 or fewer attempts per SSN).”
Miguel de Icaza on 4 June 2010 at 7:24 pm
I belong to the school of “trust, but verify” and would like to double check.
Could you post your SSN here so I can validate your results?
cepler on 29 July 2010 at 4:53 pm
Safely stored in Google’s query requests now though
Jackson on 11 February 2011 at 6:38 pm
Try it on Bing now.