From the course: CIPP/US Cert Prep: 5 State Privacy Laws

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Using the last four digits of SSNs

Using the last four digits of SSNs

From the course: CIPP/US Cert Prep: 5 State Privacy Laws

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Using the last four digits of SSNs

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- [Instructor] As organizations began to realize that storing the Social Security numbers of their employees, customers, and students wasn't such a great idea, they struggled to find another universal identifier that they could use to distinguish individuals from one another. After all, searching the database of any large organization is likely to reveal many cases where two individuals have identical names. How many John Smiths are in your organization? Records managers then came up with an interesting idea. Maybe instead of using a person's full Social Security number, they could simply use the last four digits of that number. After all, there was then only a one in 10,000 chance that two John Smiths would share the same last four digits of their Social Security numbers. That seemed like a reasonable alternative to holding the entire Social Security number because those records managers didn't think that someone could use…

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