This talk probes the career of the U.S. Social Security number for what it can tell us about the shifting ways citizens have encountered the federal state but also their own “private” data across the last century. Beginning in 1936, the SSN was affixed to more and more American lives in order to administer social benefits, spurring new uses of punch cards and filing systems as well as novel dilemmas about the housing and dissemination of personal information. The twists and turns of this history reveal the unanticipated outcomes of creating a new identification system in the 1930s—as well as the fraught relationship among technical infrastructures, data privacy, and modern citizenship.

About the speaker:

Sarah E. Igo (B.A., Harvard; Ph.D., Princeton) is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the School of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, with affiliate appointments in Law, Political Science, Sociology, and Communication of Science and Technology. Igo teaches and writes about modern American intellectual, cultural, legal, and political history, with research interests in the production of knowledge, the politics of data, the human sciences, and the history of privacy and the public sphere.

Professor Igo’s most recent book is The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018).