If you were born before 1989, your SSN can be guessed with 44% accuracy by an algorithm.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/07/social-security-numbe...

> If you were born before 1989, your SSN can be guessed with 44% accuracy by an algorithm.

The actual situation is quite a bit less dire than your quote.

What that linked article says is that for people born AFTER 1989, the first five digits could be guessed with 44% accuracy. (There's a very real sense that the "last 4 of your social" are less guessable than the first five, so it's no surprise that the last 4 is what is often used/misused.)

I've seen multiple databases that have the results of asking the user to enter the "last 4 of your SSN"

If you have those last 4 digits, and you can guess the first 5 digits with nearly 50% accuracy, then you have a very good chance on getting legitimate SSN's for mass numbers of people with a DB dump.

No your utilities do not need it. I never give my SSN to companies. Not the phone company, not the utility company, nobody I don't actually need to if I can help it. They will often waive such a requirement if you pay a small fee (usually around $5-50), which usually gets paid towards a bill after something like 6 months of paying everything in full on time.

> I almost wish Anonymous or someone would publish every American's number so that we'd be forced to stop doing it.

  for($i = 0; $i < 1000000000; $i++) {
    print str_pad($i, 9, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT) . "\n";
  }

There you go! Guaranteed to contain every American's SSN.