The number is issued to an individual by the Social Security Administration, an independent agency of the United States government.

[4] On November 24, 1936, 1,074 of the nation's 45,000 post offices were designated "typing centers" to type up Social Security cards that were then sent to Washington, D.C. On December 1, 1936, as part of the publicity campaign for the new program, Joseph L. Fay of the Social Security Administration selected a record from the top of the first stack of 1,000 records and announced that the first Social Security number in history was assigned to John David Sweeney, Jr. of New Rochelle, New York.

[9] Before this act, parents claiming tax deductions were simply trusted not to lie about the number of children they supported.

During the first year of the Tax Reform Act, this anti-fraud change resulted in seven million fewer minor dependents being claimed.

The disappearance of these dependents is believed to have involved either children who never existed or tax deductions improperly claimed by non-custodial parents.

[citation needed] Employee, patient, student, and credit records are sometimes indexed by Social Security number.

[15] Social Security was originally a universal tax, but when Medicare was passed in 1965, objecting religious groups in existence prior to 1951 were allowed to opt out of the system.

[2] Although some people do not have an SSN assigned to them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in legitimate financial activities such as applying for a loan or a bank account without one.

[21][22] The card on which an SSN is issued is still not suitable for primary identification as it has no photograph, no physical description, and no birth date.

[27] Furthermore, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated an algorithm that uses publicly available personal information to reconstruct a given SSN.

Financial institutions generally require an SSN to set up bank accounts, credit cards, and loans—partly because they assume that no one except the person it was issued to knows it.

Exacerbating the problem of using the Social Security number as an identifier is the fact that the Social Security card contains no biometric identifiers of any sort, making it essentially impossible to tell whether a person using a certain SSN truly belongs to someone without relying on other documentation (which may itself have been falsely procured through use of the fraudulent SSN).

Congress has proposed federal laws that restrict the use of SSNs for identification and bans their use for a number of commercial purposes—e.g., rental applications.

[29] The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offers alternatives to SSNs in some places where providing untrusted parties with identification numbers is essential.

[31] In accordance with §7213 of the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act of 2004 and 20 CFR 422.103, the number of replacement Social Security cards per person is generally limited to three per calendar year and ten in a lifetime.

[44] An estimated 1 in 7 Social Security numbers have been used by more than one person; usually an innocent typographical error by someone miss-typing a SSN.

One famous instance of this occurred in 1938 when the E. H. Ferree Company in Lockport, New York, decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets.

A sample card, used for display purposes, was placed in each wallet, which was sold by Woolworth and other department stores across the country; the wallet manufacturer's vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson used the actual SSN of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.

[47] The SSA initiated an advertising campaign stating that it was incorrect to use the number (Hilda Whitcher was issued a new SSN).

[48][49] List showing the geographical location of the first three digits of the Social Security numbers assigned in the United States and its territories from 1936 until June 25, 2011.