yeah or so Ive been told because i forgot how the topic came up but someone way younger than me got a really really low ssn and we started looking in to it. also, they are batch assigned by region. so, like, all the people born in a certain hospital will have the same prefix in their SSN
This is not what the article says. This 2010 article is about theft of SSNs. Numbers that have been used by more than one person. The government didn't reassign them.
Point is, if there are huge masses of duplicates in the system, then 'out' doesn't have much meaning.
Even before that though, just for the math of it:
9 digits in decimal gives a possible 1,000,000,000 unique numbers so 'out'. again, doesn't have much meaning. Less than 1/3 should be current.
Not to be That Guy here, but AKSHULLY, they did used to be like this, but now I think they're essentially random. Or at least, they're not so regimented. You're right about the old system, though. You could look up the code and it would tell you your state of birth and the year the # was issued.
Soon we will have to use social security letters, and eventually one of those random combinations of letters is going to assemble a terrorist threat, this is the danger facing America
