Hacking your social security number

Carnegie Mellon University, my alma mater, has just published a study detailing just how easy it is to hack someone's Social Security number from publicly available data.

Of course, the Social Security administration is basically saying what they've always said: that businesses and other organizations should not use the SSN as an identifier, because it is not protected. And masking all but the last 4 digits? Possibly even worse, since those are the numbers most unique to you.

The good news for some, like me, is that my SSN does not correlate directly with my birthday, because my parents didn't get mine at birth. But for many this is no longer true, since the IRS now requires a SSN to claim a child (this was not true before the mid-1980s).

My home state of Virginia has removed SSN's from driver's licenses, and cannot collect the SSN under any circumstance. The same is not necessarily true for private organizations, but what we can do as consumers is make our voices heard, and telling companies that we don't want them using our SSN's to identify us.