Researchers claim they can guess your Social Security Number!

Lady Speaker: All right, Brian. Thank you. Do you think your Social Security number is safe? Well, you might want to think again. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to correctly guess your Social Security number just by knowing your state and your date of birth.

Male Speaker: That is frightening. Alessandro Acquisti co-authored a study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Good morning to you, Alessandro. This is frightening stuff for the people out there.

Alessandro Acquisti: Good morning.

Male Speaker: Because we thought this was somewhat random and people could not predict them. You found otherwise. Tell us how easy this is, to find out someone’s Social Security number.

Alessandro Acquisti: Well, it’s quite easy. It’s too easy in a way. The accuracy of the prediction changes with the state of birth and the year of birth of the person you want to predict. It can go from very low to very high. For instance in certain cases, we can predict first five digits with 90 percent accuracy, meaning 90 percent of the SSN issued in a certain year and state can be predicted with just one attempt. As you can see on the last…

Lady Speaker: All right. Let’s look at one of those examples, Alessandro, so that people get a sense of what you’re talking about.

Alessandro Acquisti: Yes.

Lady Speaker: So if you were born July 8th in Wyoming in 1993, then the first five digits you would automatically know?

Alessandro Acquisti: Then you are not very lucky… yeah.

Lady Speaker: So how do you know automatically the first five digits are 52031?

Alessandro Acquisti: Well, because you… what we discovered is that you can combine information which is publicly available about the assignment scheme, together with other information, also publicly available from the so-called Death Master File, which is the database with the SSN of people who are dead, and you can find patterns of issuance, which allow you to estimate also the SSN of people who are still alive. So by using statistics and data mining, you can predict these digits. So the state and year you were mentioning has a very high accuracy of prediction.

Male Speaker: Alessandro, you say that if it’s a small state or if you’re born after 1988, it’s particularly easy. Why is that?

Alessandro Acquisti: That’s correct. There are two reasons for that. A smaller state has a lower population. Lower population implies fewer births in a given day. Fewer births imply slower transition for the assignment scheme and a slower transition means it’s easier to predict and it’s easier to follow. The other reason is the year. What happened was that for the 1980s and in particular at the end of the 1980s, there were some initiatives which made it more likely that the SSN would be applied for a birth. Once upon a time, you could apply for the SSN at any time of your life.

Lady Speaker: Right. Right.

Alessandro Acquisti: Usually when you start working. After 1987 and 1989, because of the process called EAB, Enumeration at Birth, most of the newborns in the US get their SSN at birth because the parents applied for them. Ironically, these initiatives were intended to decrease identity theft, to avoid fraud.

Lady Speaker: Interesting.

Alessandro Acquisti: These are non-intended consequences, which are creating irregularity, which can be exploited for the kind of reference we showed to be possible.

Lady Speaker: Yeah, well, hopefully, there aren’t many scientists out there as smart as you to figure this system out because otherwise, we’re all in trouble for identity theft.

Male Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

Lady Speaker: But if you’re born in New York, Dave. You have an advantage because there’s so…

Male Speaker: We have a little more an advantage, but it’s still frightening. Hopefully, we do something about this, Alessandro. We appreciate your time this morning.

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