SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Just add another digit and watch the entire country break down because they can’t find someone to update their 40+ year old software written in COBOL.
Sorry we can’t employ you as your ssn is too long. Also we can’t have any new employees called Mike Smith as the HR system already has someone with that name.
The LMS we use at my school can’t handle multiple students with the same name. So we have John Smith and John Smith-2. We have like 2000 new students each year, and we have recently transitioned to this LMS. Smh
I want to see the high-octane action thriller where the grizzled old hand and the renegade upstart trek to the remote compound in the woods of Montana to find Bob, the last man alive who understands how some obscure part of the IRSs core systems works and bring him back in from the cold for one last job… to save America(s neglected computer systems from decades of under investment)
Act II needs to have an overdone political scene where congress doesn’t want to pass the budget and almost shuts down the Fed meanwhile some hackers from <focus group hated country> try to take advantage of the situation or whatever
Social Security numbers are not unique identifiers.
Nope.
If you got your social Security number before 2011, your first three digits represent the geographical location you were born in. You share those three digits with each of your siblings who were born in the same geographical location before in 2011. Go ahead and ask them.
If memory serves, and all we would really need to do is check a Wikipedia article, the middle two digits were done in some weird sequence, and then the last four were pseudo-random.
So basically, any people receiving their social security number any multiple of 100 people apart from another (prior to 2011) in the same geographic location have a 1 in 10,000 chance of having identical social security numbers.
Basically, if you live in a large city, you definitely have a few twinsies out there.
This was changed in 2011, because of this, but it is still not a unique identifier. It’s just more random.
This generally isn’t true. The SSA makes an effort to assign a unique number to each individual. It’s happened before where two people have accidentally gotten the same SSN, but they try to avoid this.
We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
Why stop at hex? You could use the entire alphabet. Even if you take only uppercase letters and numbers, we are at 36^9 possible numbers. If we include lowercase and special characters from ASCII, we can go much further.
E. G. For storage and performs reasons. 5 bytes vs 9 bytes. Multiplying by amount of users and various indexes - can produce very noticeably difference. More records per page.
If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).
Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.
If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.
It’s all fun and games until you’re assigned an SSN that contains a profanity. Because you know there’s a strong chance they’ll forget to implement a check for that until someone complains, and an even stronger chance that something that looks like a profanity will escape the first implementation of checks.
e.g. There will be someone assigned IMABUM123 and a) that will get through the understaffed / automated profanity check (no four letter words) and b) the person who gets it will have so many problems getting people to believe that it’s really their SSN, including the people who could assign them a new one.
You can actually get a new SSN already, if you have strong cultural or religious issues with your SSN https://faq.ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-02220
So no need to implement a check in software, let the people do it for you.
SS numbers can’t start with a 9, so you might wanna recalculate that.
Or newborn babies. I still got a 950 number written on the back of my official birth certificate.
I think they’re used as placeholders while they file the documents. My OG SS number started with 950, but that only lasted until the paperwork was complete.
Obviously I won’t be sharing my private info here though, but yeah, those numbers can’t officially start with a 9.
There are several more that aren’t used. There are a few reserved for promotions or movies and such. 666, 900-999 and 000 numbers are out as well.
I believe that SSNs have to pass a luhn check too.
Considering there are around 330M citizens right now, I think they ran out already and they’re probably recycling them.
The first SSNs were issued in 1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number
According to the death master file entry in wiki 111x10^6 SSNs died between 1962 and 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Master_File
That’s 1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1. Assume that number to be a constant during the period 1936-2024
1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1 x (2024-1936) x year = 174.4 x 10^6 deaths
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States there’s 335.9 x 10^6 residents, but I can’t tell if they are citizens with SSNs, but I’m going to assume that for now.
So (335.9 + 174.4) x 10^6 is 510.3 x 10^6 spent SSNs.
According to the same demographics wiki article the birth rate is 11 births per 1000 population. Death rate is 10.4 deaths per 1000 population. Because I’m just doing back of the envelope estimation for fun, while trying to manage my hangover in the early afternoon, I’m not going to create an exponential function to describe population growth. Instead I’m going to only consider future the US population a constant and not consider the 200 x 10^3 annual net growth (it only affects the next year’s growth by 120 anyway)
With all of that BS out of the way, at the present birthrate the US requires 3.695 x 10^6 new SSNs annually. The total amount SSNs in the current scheme is (10^9) - 1. I’m going to be leaving out the -1. 10^9 total SSNs - 510.3x^6 spent SSNs leaves 489.7 x 10^6 SSNs available. 489.7/3.695 is 132.5.
So in conclusion, assuming a constant population, the US can go for another 132.5 years with the present scheme without having to reuse any SSN.
SSN’s are also given out to immigrants as well though, so that’s a whole other population of people outside of just natural born citizens to account for. The US awards around one million green cards annually, though I don’t know what the historical numbers are.
SSN’s are also given out to immigrants as well though
Oh snap! Thanks for bringing that up. Adding another million each year, and assuming a constant green card rate since before WW2(!), adds another 88 million spent SSNs. With an additional million green cards annually, that makes the calculation (1000-510.3-88)x10^6 SSNs /4.695 x 10^6 SSNs/year = 85.6 years.
So the US has until about the end of the century to figure it out.
How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62? Great work on the calculation but all I’m saying is, if the government ran out of numbers and recycled them already, nobody would know about it. The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me and there’s no database of SSNs you can compare it to. Weirdly enough, official government departments straight up lie about things and easily get away with it heh.
How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62?
That’s why I extrapolated from the 1962-2018 numbers and came to a total number of 174.4 x 10^6 deaths.
The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me.
Oh I agree. But it’s a classic issue with old databases. We had a similar issue awhile back with license plates in Denmark. The plates had been assigned inefficiently by incrementing parts annually. So we had unused ranges as well as disused plates. But somehow nobody had made a list of these plates.
You could be right about them recycling numbers already, but 330 million < 999 million, so that wouldn’t be why
