How Social Networking Sites Can Reveal Your Social Security Number
A new study says that mundane information like birthdays and hometowns on social-networking profiles can be used to accurately predict a user’s Social Security number, a key to identity theft.
In the study, published in the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of a person’s Social Security number about 40 percent of the time, just by knowing his or her hometown and birth date. Given those two pieces of information, they could predict all nine digits of his or her SSN 8.5 percent of the time with fewer than 1,000 attempts.
