Government agencies need to move quickly to change social security numbers after researchers discovered an accurate way to guess a persons social security number based on just birth location (or location were number was applied for) and birth date.

The Social Security Administration needs to let people reapply for new numbers that are at least somewhat randomly produced. They should adopt a policy of issuing two socials, one number would be kept solely private and for government use only, it would be against the law for any company to ask for this.

The other number would be longer, completely random, and disposable. This second number could be used by financial institutions and others with a need to verify identity. Because fraudsters could easily dump these “disposable” numbers to change IDs they would plug back into your permanent number were the SSA could then provide a a yes/no answer that the identity was true.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.