alt Hacker News> You can reliably reconstruct a SSN that is missing the first digits, if you know where the person lived when they filed for it, but that's not the same thing.
This used to be true, but isn’t for SSNs assigned since I think 2011 - the exact year could be wrong, that’s from memory. Since that switch, the component that used to be geographical is assigned randomly.
A wise move, IMO. The geographic thing made sense, pre-internet: our local office assigns only number that start "477-", and no other office does, so we can control for duplicate assignments.