SSN stands for "Social Security number," which is used in the United States not only for its original purpose of the accounting of individual contributor's public pensions, but also has come to be used as a personal identifier. Each contributor to the U.S. public pension system, known as "Social Security," receives a unique nine-digit number.
How It's Used
"In a paper published last week, two Carnegie Mellon professors unveiled a method for cracking the code of Social Security numbers. Given a person's birth date and the state where he or she was born along with public records of deceased people born around the same time, the researchers wrote an algorithm that predicted a person's SSN with startling accuracy."
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