Said this elsewhere, but wanted to be sure you had the chance to see the linked material. The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
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vonbaronhans@midwest.social 6 days agoWe have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.
Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 6 days ago
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 6 days ago
Just read that, and it says they’ve only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would’ve been a lot more than that.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I don’t think we’ve gone through 999 million options yet. Only about 300 million people have been born since 1933, so even if we add all 127 million US citizens alive in 1935, that’s still less than half of the possible social security numbers.
The reason we’ve likely reused numbers is because they weren’t randomly assigned until like 2011. Knowing that I was born in 1995 in Wichita, KS, you could make an educated guess at the first three digits of my SSN
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 6 days ago
We have 350 million people in this country literally right now. I don’t think “350 million born since 1933” makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
tempest@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Not every person in the United States was born in the United States and even temporary workers can get a SSN
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I mean you can check my math, I just added up all the births per year in this article
www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/…/111928356/
Rounding to one significant figure, it’s 311.9 million people born in the US since 1933. Adding an average of 4 million births per year since then, it’s 335.9. I rounded up to 350 to bring it to a nice round number
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 6 days ago
Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.