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“Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in th

“Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in the leaked data sets.)” The media is kind of dumb, eh?

hypeatei 2y ago
It's hilarious, 2.9 billion social security numbers (US concept) but wait... there aren't that many people in the US. The data is pretty uninteresting and has a lot of duplicate records with slight variations in the street address. SSNs are essentially public data at this point, just freeze your credit. (should be frozen by default but that's another conversation)
- avmich 2y ago
  > It's hilarious, 2.9 billion social security numbers (US concept) but wait... ... SSN has 9 decimal digits, so there are only 1 billion (or even somewhat less) of valid SSNs in the whole universe...
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    SSNs aren't web scale (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
    - khuey 2y ago
      To be fair they were introduced in 1936.
- px43 2y ago
  $ wc all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt 272535129 272535131 2997533927 all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt 272,535,129 unique SSNs in the leak, so like 82% of the US population. Somehow I'm not in it, but lots of people that I know are. Also, super important, but address history is in the leak, so all those sites that ask you about your address history to authenticate you need to knock it TF off right now.
kube-system 2y ago
The news I watched this evening said "2.9 billion records" and "potentially billions of people" which is a fairly accurate conclusion without having run any sort of query on the data. Null values are a thing too.
- yuliyp 2y ago
  it's a dataset of information about people in the US (given it comes from US public records), of which there are far less than a billion. There's no possible way it could be "billions of people". That conclusion requires no querying of the data.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Some have reported it contains data for people outside of the US. It may also have people who are not currently living in the US.
    - yuliyp 2y ago
      Sure it might contain some such data, but I strongly doubt that would be 60%+ of the dataset.

hypeatei 2y ago

It's hilarious, 2.9 billion social security numbers (US concept) but wait... there aren't that many people in the US. The data is pretty uninteresting and has a lot of duplicate records with slight variations in the street address. SSNs are essentially public data at this point, just freeze your credit. (should be frozen by default but that's another conversation)

avmich 2y ago
> It's hilarious, 2.9 billion social security numbers (US concept) but wait... ... SSN has 9 decimal digits, so there are only 1 billion (or even somewhat less) of valid SSNs in the whole universe...
- hypeatei 2y ago
  SSNs aren't web scale (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
  - khuey 2y ago
    To be fair they were introduced in 1936.
px43 2y ago
$ wc all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt 272535129 272535131 2997533927 all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt 272,535,129 unique SSNs in the leak, so like 82% of the US population. Somehow I'm not in it, but lots of people that I know are. Also, super important, but address history is in the leak, so all those sites that ask you about your address history to authenticate you need to knock it TF off right now.

kube-system 2y ago

The news I watched this evening said "2.9 billion records" and "potentially billions of people" which is a fairly accurate conclusion without having run any sort of query on the data. Null values are a thing too.

yuliyp 2y ago
it's a dataset of information about people in the US (given it comes from US public records), of which there are far less than a billion. There's no possible way it could be "billions of people". That conclusion requires no querying of the data.
- kube-system 2y ago
  Some have reported it contains data for people outside of the US. It may also have people who are not currently living in the US.
  - yuliyp 2y ago
    Sure it might contain some such data, but I strongly doubt that would be 60%+ of the dataset.