Privacy and your social security number
Pretty much everybody in the USA has a social security number (SSN) and much of the private and public data related to us is attached in one way or another to that SSN. Not a bad system, you might say. After all, a more-or-less random 9 digit number is fairly secure. The problem is that our SSN is anything but random. In fact, apparently it's pretty predictable. In a new study conducted by Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, has shown that public information readily gleaned from governmental sources, commercial data bases, or online social networks can be used to routinely predict most and sometimes all of a person's SSN. The study findings will appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) Carnegie Mellon views this news as sufficiently serious to merit setting up a website solely for the purpose of educating people about security and SSN. Acquisti ...