sparkletone

alex

@sparkletone

internet echolalia

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sparkletone
@sparkletone
vogon
@vogon
vogon
@vogon

finding out about some social security number lore tonight

Some SSNs used in advertising have rendered those numbers invalid. One famous instance of this occurred in 1938 when the E. H. Ferree Company in Lockport, New York, decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was placed in each wallet, which was sold by Woolworth and other department stores across the country; the wallet manufacturer's vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson used the actual SSN of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher. [...] Over time, the number that appeared (078-05-1120) has been claimed by a total of over 40,000 people as their own. The SSA initiated an advertising campaign stating that it was incorrect to use the number (Hilda Whitcher was issued a new SSN). However, the number was found to be in use by 12 individuals as late as 1977.

  1. why would you do this
  2. why would you do this with someone else's SSN
  3. lmao
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in reply to @vogon's post:

thievul
@thievul

in what fucking universe would someone think this was even remotely a reasonable thing to do instead of making the sample card just... say XXX-XX-XXXX? or be all zeroes or literally anything else??? lmao?????

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

I really love that not a single one of these people expected to get away with it long term. Probably mostly confused people going "huh do I have a social security card? Oh here's one" lmao

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

tbf. the SSN was not intended to be a de-facto federal ID number originally. it was just supposed to be for, well, social security stuff, and I presume "two people both claiming benefits with the same number" would've been caught very quickly. It's only been since then that it slowly became the default ID number for literally everything under the sun.

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jcolag
@jcolag

The most straightforward analogy to Social Security Numbers at the time would probably be e-mail addresses today, where an individual address is meaningless to the vast majority of people (though you can learn some things about the person if you inspect it), it's used to identify you by some organizations and not others, and so many people create example addresses so plausible that they're held by actual people, which is why test.com and example.com needed to get taken off the market.

And also like e-mail addresses, other organizations have no problem saying "sure, that's close enough to identify you for our purposes, even though it's easy to spoof."

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Xuelder
@Xuelder

One of the dumbest things our school did one year was make our student ID contain the last four digits of our social. Which, because of the demographics of our school, meant one could guess a full social security number based on date and location of birth.

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