In 1997, Michael Shackleford was an employee of the Office of the Actuary at the Social Security Administration's headquarters in Baltimore; his wife was pregnant and he was determined to avoid giving the child a common name like his own. With his access to Social Security card data, he wrote a simple program to sort the information by year of birth, gender, and first name. Suddenly he could see every Janet born in 1960. He could see that the number one names in 1990 were Michael and Jessica. He realized this could be important. "I knew that my eyeballs were seeing this list of the most popular baby names nationwide for the first time," he recalled recently. "It was too good to keep to myself."
Apr 20, 2013
Ever Wonder How It Was That Social Security Started Compiling Lists Of The Most Popular Baby Names?
From The Atlantic:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Good to see he was putting his time on the job to good use. LOL
seems like an obvious PII issue. He's lucky he didn't get fired.
"seems like an obvious PII issue." I thought that too. I could see me trying to explain that I was searching Numidents to find a good name for my baby.
People in central office consider themselves to be above petty rules like PII. Those rules only apply to the peons who actually do the work.
Post a Comment