Black Hat: Your Social Security Number Can Be Predicted With Online Information, Say Researchers
If you were born at a time when social security numbers were not required, you can probably recognize other people from your home state if you see or hear their numbers. You may have thought there was a smarter system in place by now. Not so, and it's actually easy to glean a social security number, say project lead Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon's H. John Heinz III College, and Ralph Gross, a post-doctoral researcher, who have shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most — and sometimes all — of an individual's nine-digit Social Security number. read more
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