Social Security Numbers

[WaterBomb]

This is a random question (I hope it's in the right forum) that I was pondering today and I didn't know the answer to. Perhaps it will spark some intelligent discussion as well.

What happens when there are more living people in the US than there are available social security numbers? Since the SSNs are 9 digits, that should provide approximately 999,999,999 different combinations. I suppose this means that when there are 1 billion or more people ALIVE (assuming they recycle numbers of dead people) in the US, a change will need to be made. Anyone have actual knowledge on what will happen? Or maybe some suggestions/ideas about what the solution could be? I'm curious.

 

[biggie]

They do not recycle the numbers of those who have died as of this moment. This may be an issue in the future, however. I'd assume that this would be the most logical course of action, as it requires no change to the infrastructure of the system and simply requires a refreshment of records. What may pose a problem however is the development of different regions. Numbers are not randomly given out, rather they are given out in regional batches (this is why people who are from the area that you are from will have a similar set of numbers in their own SSN).

 

[cantab]

SSNs were never intended to be necessarily unique, and they were originally intended to be used for one specific purpose. My understanding is that they've been co-opted for uses they weren't meant for, as well as becoming something like a password that you want to keep secret and that if known by another is hugely useful for them to steal your identity. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

[TheAmazingFlygon]

There is also a possibility to increase the number of numbers in a SNN to 10 or 11, for instance.

 

[Athenodoros]

I don't really understand the culture of social security numbers, but from a purely computational point of veiw, 1 billion is almost two bytes, so the computers would not have to be changed much to bring it up to over 4 billion, the highest number possible in two bytes. I would have thought it would be easiest to just continue up to there.

 

[manav95]

Well most likely the digits are going to be expanded to something like 10 or 11. If the system met the problem you described, then it would have to change or multiple people would be in trouble. With more digits, you could easily have more people in the system without trouble.

 

[biggie]

But what about those who already have a 9 digit number? What will become of them?

 

[manav95]

^They will get new numbers under the system.

 

[cantab]

I don't really understand the culture of social security numbers, but from a purely computational point of veiw, 1 billion is almost two bytes, so the computers would not have to be changed much to bring it up to over 4 billion, the highest number possible in two bytes.

You're assuming they're stored as integers. It's quite probably a lot of existing systems store them as fixed-length strings, or maybe as BCD.

Extending the numbers would be a huge challenge, because almost every existing system that uses SSNs would need changing in some way. For some it may be a simple change of the validation rules. For others it could require patching software binaries for which the source code is unavailable, or altering numerous areas of a complex system. The best comparison would probably be the Y2K bug, for which an estimate of the expenditure in preventing problems is 300 billion dollars (worldwide). Changing SSN length shouldn't be so pervasive, but still, I'd expect it to cost tens of billions.

 

[umbarsc]

If this ever becomes an issue, a (theoretically) simple solution would be to switch from numbers to letters. Then there would be 26 possibilities for each character instead of 10. I'm not going to do the math, but that allows for exponentially larger combination possibilities, which solves the issue to some extent. But if there are ever that many people in the US, then the issue of limited ssn possibilities would be the least of anyone's concerns.