this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
28 points (96.7% liked)
privacy
3005 readers
7 users here now
Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
Partners:
- community.nicfab.it/c/privacy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Take your social security number. Change the last number by one. Congrats, you have stolen someones number.
It isn't secure or random in any way. Infact, by doing the above you will have the number of a person born probably in the same hospital as you.
That's not true anymore. My kids have very different SSNs.
Are your kids twins?
Is usa numbering just incremental? Canadian ones use a checksum type setup to determine if it is a valid SIN
There's some brackets based on area and similar https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html
Isn't it the address being leaked with it that makes this notable?
You can't add a number to a SSN and also add a number to the street address to then narrow down which full names are associated with that SSN to then possibly be able to use it.
I didn't think the number had any use on its own
The address does make it a lot more useful, but the point that I am making is simply that the number itself has never been secure, and this kinda failure was inevitable due to only needing slightly more info than the number itself. A number which itself is already partially identifying.
We shouldn't use social security numbers like we do.
I mean it says right on the fucking card not to .
But some institutions insist.