Slashdot Mirror
How Face Recognition Can Uncover SSNs
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)."
Has nothing to do with nuclear submarines.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
90% of Americans don't care if you know anything and everything about them, are invading their privacy, tracking their behavior or identifying their SSids. They latch onto kitch phrases like "The government owns Facebook" but they don't really understand what their personal and private freedoms are worth.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The writeup made it sound like you could look at a crappy snapshot of a person and magically discover their SSN. What actually happened is that they trolled the Facebook profiles for their hometown and date of birth to discover the SSNs, the webcam was just to match up the person sitting at a terminal currently with their Facebook profile. The story is basically: Off the shelf facial recognition software seems to work pretty good, even with a crappy webcam.
I read the internet for the articles.
I find this article title to be silly.
What they do is use facial recognition to match people to their Facebook profile, then use the details stored there to obtain the SSN.
Up next:
- How names and surnames can Uncover SSN
- How giving people your email address can Uncover SSN.
- How running a facebook search can Uncover SSN
The algorithm found out people hometowns and dates of birth, and used it to determine the first 5 digits of the SSN (not the scarier last 4 digits).
Finally, the third experiment was the one to link faces to their unique nine digits
For those participants who had date of birth and city publicly available on their account, the researchers could predict a social security number (based on the work from their 2009 study). The researchers sent a follow-up survey to their student participants asking them whether the first five digits of the social security number their algorithm predicted was correct.
I'm missing a little something here.
Until recently, the first five digits, were, by definition, based on state/city and birthdate. Ask a genealogist or anyone interested in "private eye" stuff from the past couple decades... they probably have a table you can look up the first five vs location. The first three were strictly based on state; I was born in WI in the 70s; We all have the same first 3. The next two were issued more or less by city/hospital. So everyone born in the same hospital, pretty much for that year, has the same first five. At most, they had a rather shallow pool of a couple to draw from. Why they needed a study in 2009 to "discover" something that has been in endless publications is a mystery. Its like saying we need a "study" to "discover" how to fill out a IRS 1040 form based on neural network analysis of a statistical sample of tax returns, or we could just RTFM or RTF govt publication explaining in great detail what the answer already is.
You don't even need a statistical sample study. Just pull the SSDI and chug away. Social Security Death Index. Notice anything interesting about the publicly available SSNs for people born in Milwaukee in the mid 70s who are already dead? You have to wonder about old people, if the only person left alive from my Grandma's birthplace/birthyear is granny, and all SSNs for that year and hospital are in the SSDI except for the one ending in 1234, and she's the only one left alive, hmm, I wonder what grannies SSN might be? The point being that the "secret" is by no means 4 digits long = 1 out of 1e4. Its more like 1 out of (1e4 minus the number of dead people per the SSDI) I would imagine some entire swaths of the SSN namespace are dead people in the SSDI, except for the few elderly still living.
The other mystery is all they verified was the "public" half of the SSN. The "private" 4 digits was not verified. So, they've accomplished ... nothing.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The SSN was never intended as a means of identification initially, but:
1. When a system of identification was needed, the SSN system was already in place;
2. In theory, SSNs have a 1:1 person-to-number correspondence, unlike other forms of identification (name, birthplace, birthdate, etc.);
3. Without such a system, the government would perform much more invasive checks for things like employment, voting, and banking.
So either you accept that the government shouldn't be doing such things (so "illegal" immigrants can work, dead people can vote, and terrorists can open bank accounts, e.g.) or you recognize that SSNs are the lesser of two evils.
That doesn't mean there couldn't be a better system, but such a system would invariably require the government to keep even more information about its citizens.
I have triplets. Two of the SSNs are sequential. The third is the second +5.