Same Birthday, Same Social Security Number, Same Mess For Two Florida Women (cio.com)

itwbennett writes: After 25 years, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has fessed up to giving two Florida women who shared a name and a birthday the same social security number. The women only recently discovered that they shared an SSN, but not before having trouble getting loans and having tax returns rejected. You might think that the SSA would catch something like this, but as it turns out, they are prohibited from trying to verify the legitimate owner of an SSN, except in rare cases, says Ken Meiser, VP of identity solutions at ID Analytics, provider of credit and fraud risk solutions. And the problem isn't as rare as you might think (except for the part about two women with the same name born on the same day in the same state). According to a 2010 study by ID Analytics, some 40 million SSNs are associated with multiple people.

Comments

Re: unique id

[ag0ny]

The way the SSN is, it is like having a password for very important things, but one that you have to give out to every street vendor to verify you as well. Identity theft nightmare for the owner.

No.

The problem isn't what the SSN is. The problem is the way the SSN is used.

I'm Spanish. In Spain we have a national ID system, and I have my own ID number. However, we don't use this number as a password in order to verify that we are who we say we are. It's used more or less as an index in a database. You can easily find my national ID number with a simple Google search. Mine, and probably every other Spanish citizen's. No big deal about it.

In you case, what's going on is that a bunch of clueless policy makers working for businesses decided that the SSN would work fine as a way to identify people. It's not. You're using it wrong.