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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it is time that the US stops relying on SSNs being “secret”…

Doesn't change the fact that DOGE are criminal scumbags with root access who did illegal things nobody should ever do. It doesn't matter at all if SSNs were replaced by something decent when young naive and impressionable scumbags with root access and no morals whatsoever will simply steal the data anyway. Quite the contrary even, secure SSN as data loot is even more valuable to the thieves.

They should be considered unique (public) usernames

My understanding is that they're not even guaranteed to be unique.

Yup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...

Why? Are they stupid?

Yes. The whole idea is very flawed. It would be good if we got rid of it entirely but most people can't mentally/emotionally/financially handle that so we end up with a lot of bad compromises.

Source? From what I can gather they're supposed to be unique and they don't reuse them. If two people have the same number then it's a mistake.

"Under a few rare circumstances, SSA may legitimately issue a new SSN to a person with a prior SSN. The conditions are highly restrictive."

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html

> From what I can gather they're supposed to be unique and they don't reuse them. If two people have the same number then it's a mistake.

Yes, it is a mistake for two people to be issued the same number and it is unusual for multiple to be issued to the same person.

However given the very large volume and the conditions under which things have happened (not just currently but back to 1936!) both mistakes and unusual conditions exist in numbers that cannot be ignored.

ED25519 keys being short and quick to generate makes this state of affairs infuriating whenever it turns up - SSNs, credit card numbers etc.

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