Dead Man's Switch

Re:Dead Man's Switch by whywhywhy5 on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:36PM (#7548368)

How about a site where you enter your SSN? Then if you're ever listed as deceased in the Social Security Death Index, that will be the trigger.

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by steveklabnik on Monday April 07, 2014 @03:21PM (#7548712)

SSNs aren't unique, so this seems quite risky.

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by benmanns on Monday April 07, 2014 @04:23PM (#7549202)

Wow! I had no idea. According to http://www.idanalytics.com/news-and-events/news-releases/201...

> More than 15 percent of SSNs are associated with two or more people. More than 140,000 SSNs are associated with five or more people. Significantly, more than 27,000 SSNs are associated with 10 or more people.

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by steveklabnik on Monday April 07, 2014 @04:39PM (#7549308)

Yup. It was stated over and over again that SSNs were not supposed to be a form of ID, but nobody pays attention...

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by jimktrains2 on Monday April 07, 2014 @07:19PM (#7550347)

I've always wondered how the SS administration deals with this. SSN _should_ be unique, but in practice they're not, so how do these people deal with taxes and _gasp_, social security?

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by chid on Monday April 07, 2014 @09:30PM (#7550895)

If I were to guess I'd say they use other ID factors such as name/dob

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Re:Dead Man's Switch by GeneralMayhem on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @07:51AM (#7552777)

That article is referring to corporate records, though, and leads with the fact that many people have multiple SSNs if you track all their commercial accounts as gospel truth. Does social security actually hand out duplicate SSNs, or is this all caused by people not remembering theirs/bad typing?

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