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Comment by Helithumper | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that personal info such as Kevin’s SSN wasn’t removed prior to release.

Other people have mentioned this… but it’s been established in policy that the SSN of a deceased person is not PII. There are a ton of different ways to get the SSN of someone who is deceased.

If anything, having it public could dissuade others from trying to use it.

They aren't "public" but if you have a good reason, the govt will let you see the list of dead people SSNs. It's one of the first things checked when you're trying to open a line of credit because it's so easy to verify.

Er, what risk does the release of an SSN pose to someone two years deceased?

TIL.

Now I’m wondering how many other people in this thread don’t know he died (pancreatic cancer). 59 isn’t that old. And he was expecting a baby at the time, which suggests maybe they didnt think so either.

Looking at the post made after he passed, not many people were aware he was sick.

Pancreatic cancer is a fast and deadly one.

Thanks. I had no idea he'd passed, either.

Here's to hoping for some early detection tech:

Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035147 - Yesterday (233 comments)

Steve's Job SSN is 549-94-3295. How can this release harm a dead person?

Didn't you read Elon's post? SSNs database isn't deduplicated!

That's because there are SSNs shared by multiple people.

What? That sounds less than ideal.

It usually wasn't intentional: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/misused.html

The system still has to disambiguate and support the prospect of it happening though.

https://www.credit.com/blog/the-most-misused-social-security...

Him, probably not. His estate, however, potentially. Perhaps one could get a loan, using his SSN, and his estate gets the bill and subsequent harassment.

SSNs make terrible secrets and it's insane that you could harm a live person by knowing their SSN. I doubt that insanity stops just because you're dead.

> I doubt that insanity stops just because you're dead.

It really does stop. What can you do with someone’s SSN? Get loans, open bank accounts, receive government benefits, set up utilities, etc. It harms someone because creditors falsely believe that the SSN’s holder owes the debt, or the government believes that the SSN’s holder received benefits, etc.

People who are falsely reported as dead have a difficult time doing anything… certainly a hard time getting loans. It’s certainly going to be hard to make a claim against an estate that’s been closed for a couple years, with a debt that is dated after that person’s death.

It's worse if you share a name and birth date with someone, doubly worse if they die before you.

In general, identity verification is a joke in the US. At best its a racket.

If someone is asking for an SSN they’ll be doing a credit report which will show if you’ve died.

Well, it might show if you've been reported to have died. It's possible you were reported as dead but you're still alive. It's possible you weren't reported dead but are. And it's also possible that regardless of how you were reported, the credit agency will botch the lookup and report your dead-or-alive status wrong.

Given the amount of erroneous information in credit files, I wouldn't be surprised if the above scenarios happen regularly.

Estates are issued their own, fresh TIN (taxpayer id). Once established they don't operate under the SSN of the deceased.

Creditors have access to the death index too.

On top of that, he'd be super popular as a target for anything because tons of folks, including non-technical, know the name "Mitnick" very well.

But they clearly left the year visible so blocking out the AUSA's name seems dumb too as it wouldn't be hard to look up who were the AUSAs to narrow down who was named in the file.

The entire redacting seems just so superficial

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