Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

This keeps me awake at night. Where I live, Uber is the only ride service, but my account is in a sketchy limbo that is still working for now. Years ago I wanted to drive for one night to try it out, so now my account is stuck as a “partner.” I can’t change my phone number or anything in the app because it tells me to go to the partner site. I can’t log into that for some reason, and I can’t reset my password because it claims my personal info (SSN) is already in use by another account. Of course support is robots that tell me to do the obvious.

One day I’m sure my account is going to get roboflagged as an anomaly and I’ll be screwed on the side of the road.

View on HN

Public service announcement:

SSN's are not unique, and were never intended to be. They are assigned using an allocation scheme that ensures people of similar age will not have the same SSN, and that allows localities to independently allocate them at birth without creating collisions.

I don't think any of your claims are true.

https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html

SSNs are not unique for a whole lot of reasons. https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your...

OK, so the one claim about not being unique has some truth to it. Yes, they are mis-used (either mistakenly or maliciously) to some extent by people they were not assigned to, but they were never intended to be non-unique, which was the primary claim I was responding to, along with the other ones.

[edit] There is a related claim (not made above) that is correct, which is SSNs were never intended to be a secret.

The link you provided explains the algorithm they used to use to assign SSNs, and gives enough information to let you reason that SSNs were not unique prior to the change.

In the past, it was actually illegal to demand someone's SSN for non-official use. The social security administration seems to encourage SSN harvesting now. I'm not sure what changed. Probably scope creep / financial incentives leading to increasing privacy violations.

I've barely used any ride sharing apps but I definitely did not cough up my SSN. Can you just start over with a new account and no SSN, maybe a new CC?

I had to fill out a W-9 (I think) when I signed up to drive. Since my account is stuck as a “partner” it wants me to submit information to recover access to it, even though my “rider” access via my phone number works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com