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Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL?

Yeah, obviously ol’ boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn’t used in the government.

Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the Vice Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).

I’m not aware of any instance where two people share an SSN though. The Social Security Administration even goes as far as to say they don’t recycle the SSNs of dead people (its linked a couple times in other comments and Voyager doesn’t let me save drafts of comments, I’ll make an edit to this comment with that link for you).

Can you point me to somewhere showing multiple people can share an SSN?

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ryegye24@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Assuming the whole “duplicate SSN” thing isn’t just a complete fabrication, we have no idea what table he was even looking at! A table of transactions e.g. would have a huge number of duplicate SSNs.

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- homicidalrobot@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  The fact that SSN aren’t singular identifiers has been public knowledge for quite a while. ID analytics has shown in over a decade of studies that some people have multiple SSN attached to their name, while some (over five million) SSN are used by three or more living individuals. If you search “ID analytics SSN” you’ll find loads of articles reporting on this dating back to 2010 and a bit before.
  
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  - DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Was trying to find something from the SSA itself on the topic, but didn’t turn anything useful up on the quick.
    
    Here is a link for the lazy on the topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6C10406347
    
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WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I mean I don’t know a ton about SQL but one thing to keep in mind about SSNs is they were not originally meant to be used for identification but because we have no form of national id and places still needed a way to verify who you are people just started using SSNs for that since it’s something everyone has and there wasn’t really a better option. So now the government has been having to try and make them work for that and make them more secure. The better solution would be to make some form of national id that is designed to be secure but Republicans and people like Musk would probably call that government overreach or a way to spy and track people.

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- DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Ugh, YES, I am so frustrated at the counter arguments for this that I constantly hear spouted by my (ultra-conservative) family.
  
  I hope that notion re-enters the public consciousness as a part of this (not holding my breath tho)
  
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socsa@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
My wife has a tax payment history under two different legal names which share a single SSN

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- DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Hmmm, well I can’t speak to how the actual databases are put together, so maybe they would have that as two separate unique primary keys with a duplicated SSN.
  
  But it really seems like bad design if they out it together that way…
  
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  - JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Worth noting is that “good” database design evolved over time (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). If anything was setup pre-1970s, they wouldn’t have even had the conception of the normal forms used to cut down on data duplication. And even after they were defined, it would have been quite a while before the concepts trickled down from acedmemia to the engineers actually setting up the databases in production.
    
    On top of that, name to SSN is a many-to-many relationship - a single person can legally change their name, and may have to apply for a new SSN (e.g. in the case of identity theft). So even in a well normalized database, when you query the data in a “useful” form (e.g. results include name and SSN), it’s probably going to appear as if there are multiple people using the same SSN, as well as multiple SSNs assigned to the same person.
    
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Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
This is from 15 years ago, so I don’t know how much has changed since then. But this sounds like the sort of thing they mean.

nbcnews.com/…/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-…

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- DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  In responding to other comments, I’ve found similar things.
  
  All the same, thanks for the resources!
  
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kboy101222@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’d imagine the numbers of dead people eventually get cycled around to. 9 digits only gives you 999,999,999 people to go through, and we have over a third of that in existence right now.

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