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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.

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