[PaulHoule]

I think had relatives in Poland in the 1980s who were collecting social security for a dead person.

The U.S. has a database of social security numbers of the deceased which is quite interesting for a few reasons. It is closely guarded because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa.

If you manage to get in that database you are really in trouble because every financial institution has a copy of that list and there is no procedure to get you off. It is quite literally a “financial death sentence.”

[withinboredom]

> because social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa.

This has been false for decades. (early '90s, I think?)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

If it stopped being true in 1990, then it remains true for anybody over the age of 34, which is not exactly a small chunk of the population. (Though yes it's a good thing they stopped doing sequential numbers)

Edit: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomizationfaqs.html seems to say that the change was only implemented in 2011, which would mean that even more of the population is unaffected.

[withinboredom]

My sisters were born after 1990, and they have random ssn's ... especially compared to my brother and I who were born before 1990 (we were all born in the same city). I think the scheme implemented in 2011 is a more random one than the previous scheme or maybe it wasn't implemented everywhere before 2011, and took 20 years to implement (which is also believable).

[somethingwitty1]

SSNs are no longer distributed in that fashion. They are randomly assigned since 2011. But they also weren't sequential. They were divided up by regions and doled out to more local areas.

[PaulHoule]

Each state is sequential. If you know where somebody is born, it is sequential.

[toast0]

> social security numbers are assigned sequentially by geographic region so if you know someone’s SSN you can get their date of birth or vice versa.

Note that enumeration at birth is a recent policy change. Before enumeration at birth, people would not get assigned a number until they (or their parents) asked for one. So while there is a sequential numbering (before that changed) and its tied to geography, the sequence and geography is connected to time and place of assignment, not time and place of birth.

For example, my parents got SSNs for me and my siblings all at once, sometime in the 80s, I beleive as it became required to claim dependents on tax returns. I don't think our SSNs are sequential, but they're close; however my siblings and I have different birth years and could have been born in different states than where we were enumerated.

[Spooky23]

Closely guarded? It’s not available to the public. There’s probably a few million people who can access the death register in some capacity.

SSNs aren’t secure credentials without validation, period.