How Face Recognition Can Uncover SSNs

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday August 1, 2011 @03:42AM from the oh-thats-just-fine dept.

nonprofiteer writes "Building on previous work showing that social security numbers are not random, CMU researchers ran experiments in which they predicted students' social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam. Using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology and data-mining publicly available Facebook photos and profile information, they were able to come up with the social security numbers of several of the students. (More impressive, as they note that 60% of the students were foreign, and had no SSNs, leaving them a pool of less than 50)."

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Re:want to see something really scary? by SQLGuru · 2011-08-01 04:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

Actually, it's the fault of the banking industry for comandeering a government number for a purpose other than what it was intended. An SSN was not supposed to be a unique identifier for anyone other than Uncle Sam as they go to collect Social Security tax money and then pay it back out.