O New York Times de hoje publica uma reportagem sobre um estudo publicado (estudo na íntegra) no Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrando a vulnerabilidade do sistema de numeração do SSN, o análogo americano ao CPF brasileiro.
O abstrato do artigo:
Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.
Um outro artigo também publicado no PNAS fala da falta de segurança do SSN:
The main issue is that, as Acquisti and Gross demonstrate (1), the SSN is not a secure identifier, particularly for individuals born in 1993 and later. If the SSN is not secure in the sense that it is straightforward to associate it with an individual for whom a name and date-of-birth are available, then it can be very easy to steal such an individual’s identity.
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