THE Lowly Peon

Don't be Evil or Creepy

▼

23 February 2011, 5:25am

I'm not sure if any of this is true, but it sure sounds like it.

Google had a contest recently for kids that, on the entry form, required parents to enter the kids' date of birth, city of birth and last four digits of their social security number.

Hmmm.

You see what Google knows and many parents don't know is that a person's city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the first five digits of his/her social security number. Then, if you can somehow obtain those last four SSN digits explicitly — voila, you've unlocked countless troves of personal information from someone who didn't even understand that such a disclosure was happening.