As I was reading an article from Marty on the National Identity cards in Britain, I saw many parallels with social security cards here in the states. I found an interesting article in PNAS that came out last summer which basically makes the case that it’s possible to predict someone’s social security number using a person’s date and place of birth. In the age of social media and data mining, this information is pretty widely available and I can personally relate as I have my hometown & birthday on my Facebook profile visible to my friends.

What really struck me is that the US government is assigning SSNs in a systematic process. The first 3 digits is the area number based on the zip code of your mailing address, the next 2 are a group number that is assigned in a precise but non-consecutive order & the last 4 are a serial number assigned consecutively from 0001-9999. Without the randomness to the process, it is therefore possible for identity thieves to identify you based on this demographic information and “triangulating” your number based on other SSNs around your number (e.g. similar to the U of Texas study finding that the Netflix recommendation software made it possible to de-anonymize rental histories to identify specific customers.) www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/technology/13netflix.html

This is just one example of how our political-legal framework has a great influence on privacy and in some ways is indirectly disclosing our identity without our knowledge.