Q. What is this research about?
We studied the assignment scheme of Social Security numbers (SSNs) and discovered that individual SSNs can be predicted entirely from public data. Specifically, we found that it is possible to combine information from government sources with simple demographic data (such as an individual's state and date of birth, widely available from commercial databases, voter registration lists, or online social networks) to predict narrow ranges of values wherein individual SSNs are likely to fall.
