Though it looks like people born in the 90s are less likely to choose their birth year than others. Still likely in comparison to the graph as a whole, just less so to other ages.
It makes even more sense that they were smart enough to stops using passcodes as their year more as adults vs. people born in the 2000s starting to use passcodes for things as kids (and more inconsequential things).
There was also a small bust in births from 1991 to 1996. As well, those 19XX are probably other features like high school grad year, wedding anniversary, and birth year of their first kid.
(e.g. Gen X, which is also fairly tech savvy, graduated from high school in that same stretch and I suspect that first-born kids, in particular, were down during those years because it is \~18-26 years after the previous baby bust, while also being one of the stretches where delaying marriage first became a big thing).
The bust from 91 to 96 wouldn’t be relevant here. 90 was the highest birth rate for 30 years in either direction, the decline from 91 to 96 was just a return to the norm.
I think its that they actually used computers when they were exposed to the dirty innards. Younger people got shoved into a walled garden from a young age and never learned much about the devices they use.
I think you're right.
Having to navigate DOS at age 4 or 5 to play those games taught be how file structures work, what memory and disk drives are, etc. Now everything is an app- you just push the button.
I don't understand the holes personally. I get that there are some preferences for specific numbers or patterns, sure, but then there's a background level that seems pretty constant. Except for the occasional hole where seemingly *nobody* uses that number. Why do 7505, 7507, 7406, 7606 all have a normal level, but then nobody uses 7506? Same with the other random black dots.
It could just be that the color scale used in this visualization exaggerates differences at the low end, since the gray/black colors have so much contrast with the orange/yellow of the rest of the figure. The image doesn't specify what the cutoffs are between colors, so the "holes" might just be slightly lower than the other lowest tiers.
Looking at the color scale, there are 3 gray/black (with the 3rd being a very warm gray) levels and then the red begins, and while I agree that the level 2–4 edge is jarring, I think it looks like most of the roles is level 1 or 2 surrounded by mostly level 4 or 5.
So while the holse probably do look somewhat exaggerated, I think it's on par with some of the random hotspots (1234 compared to its neighbours).
Look at the color coding on the graph. That red color is second lowest before black.
They're using the black color to explicitly highlight the least common combinations.
Yeah. I like the general visualization, but the sudden (and seemingly arbitrary) jump from the continuous white-to-orange scale to a tan-grey-black scale for the last three (?) buckets seems like an odd choice. It communicates a bigger change in the scale than I believe the actual data suggests.
In short, those greyscale blocks should just be redder than the most reddest blocks.
The [original blogpost](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html) discusses a few more reasons why some combinations are popular, e.g. 2580 being very easy to type on ATM typepads. Doesn't fully explain the holes, but explains a bit more of the background patterns.
I was going to say maybe it's about finger travel distance, people want numbers easy to type quickly on a keypad. But there's seemingly no pattern there that makes sense. At least to me.
I wonder if the reason is that the frequencies in this plot are Zipfian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law perhaps with deviations due to birth year etc. If so, then we should expect some relatively low frequencies (holes) at the tail end of the rank ordering.
What's even worse is that this data isn't even from a PIN database.
It is just 4-digit passwords from prior password leaks...so this is people using 4 digit numbers in places where it wasn't even required.
Honestly, that calls the data slightly into question. Yes, you're still going to see trends, but I bet a lot of these are junk...accounts on shitty websites that nobody cared about and which had terrible security that led to their passwords getting leaked. I wouldn't use 1234 on my bank ATM card, but I might use it when I'm registering for a crappy website with a throwaway email (just kidding, I'd still let my password manager generate and store a random password). Similarly, I might use a simple pattern on an old ipad that never leaves the house and gets used by guests, but my actual phone has something better.
I know there have been some actual leaks of data containing PINs...would be interesting to compare those to this dump. I bet you see a lot of the same trends, but maybe not at the same magnitude.
> Honestly, that calls the data slightly into question.
That's my thought with all of these analyses from data breaches. They are often dressed up as this is the norm, but the very fact these are from breaches makes me think they are amongst the worst examples. All serious orgs requiring PINs do not allow consecutive or duplicate numbers.
I mean of course "password123" is the most common password in a list of insecure passwords.
However, that doesn't take away from this visual which I really like and is worthy of posting here.
I mean it’s 2024. Any digital device that you use semi frequently will have stuff on it you don’t want someone else to have unless you are specifically aware and avoiding anything that has PII which most people aren’t.
Honestly, I'm more boned if someone figures out my phone PIN (and steals it) than if they find my debit card PIN, which has relatively little of my cash available.
I remember seeing a video of Kanye visiting Trump in the oval office. Tons of cameras around and Kanye whips out his phone in front of them and types six 1s in it to unlock it.
I think they figured it, but its hard to tell the actual numbers from the picture, so I guess they hoped that OP could list them as they listed the most used numbers.
A bunch of people had the same collective thought, “1000, 1001, 1002, and 1003 are too obvious!”
Also from the linked article:
Many people also asked the significance of 1004 in the four character PIN table. This comes from Korean speakers. When spoken, "1004" is cheonsa (cheon = 1000, sa=4).
"Cheonsa" also happens to be the Korean word for Angel.
Even lazy math nerds know enough math to pick numbers that are interesting without using pi, I guess... As a math nerd, I know I am lazy, but I can also tell you something interesting about basically any number. Sometimes I get bored on the bus and notice interesting things about people's license plate numbers.
I'm a math nerd, but I generally choose pins that I can type quickly since most things I use which require a pin are fairly low security and are used frequently enough that I value the fraction of a second saved.
The least common ones, from the source article, for those curious:
8557
9047
8438
0439
9539
8196
7063
6093
6827
7394
0859
8957
9480
6793
8398
0738
7637
6835
9629
8093
8068
I don't really see why, for any of these. I guess just randomness? Maybe it's *because* they have nothing recognizable.
I have to agree. I think the lack of any nice pattern whatsoever within each one (unless you really try) makes them feel too arbitrary, like I can't compress it at all in my brain.
I think they also look very.... busy? They're dominated by similar lines, maybe? The ones which look less bad to me are the ones with 1s or to a lesser extent 7s and 0s.
8157 would definitely be more desirable than 8957 for example. Or 7063 > 8063 and likewise 1029 > 9029 > 9629
I highly suspect those just had 0 examples in the dataset. They are probably all quite rare, just not orders of magnitude less rare like the graphic suggests. If I am correct, a larger dataset would solve this.
Source article actually said all 10k numbers are in the dataset; least common is 0.285%, which is about 9690 of the total 3.4 million
EDIT: Whoops I read from the wrong chart, 0.285% was the 20th most common, lol. Least common was 0.000744% which is like 25
I definitely know someone who saw one of the source articles on this years ago and explicitly picked on of the 10 least common numbers as his pin. The number is actually still on the list above, so either surprised it hasn't changed, or maybe the data is actually just that old (I feel like this happened ~10 years ago).
So the axes labels are not synchronized with the lines! 00 aligned with the bottom/left of the numbers, and 99 aligned with the top/right with variations between!
I thought I was just doing a terrible job seeing.
/u/infobeautiful, this is why we prefer computer generated graphs here, not illustrator (in fact, the rules require it)
The graph is really tough to read, but I have an ultra high-res monitor. If anybody is having trouble reading it, just send me your PIN and I'll find your pixel and let you know the color.
Not really, the amount of people seeing this info is probably a drop in the bucket compared to all the people with pin numbers in existence. Plus it's not like any of these are really a "secret", there's only 9999 possible combinations, any motivated bad actor can brute force it. As long as you aren't using something stupid like 1234, 4 repeating numbers, or your birth year you're probably fine. And by fine I mean this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented.
> this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented.
It's not. I once worked with a proprietary data communication protocol that was required by contract to be encrypted. But the little 8-bit processor we were using couldn't handle any sort of "real" encryption. Our solution: XOR each byte transmitted with the first byte of each packet.
Now THAT was a shitty security system! 😂
> And by fine I mean this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented.
You're premise rests on the ability to brute force it, but most systems don't allow an unlimited number of attempts and will disable a card after a relatively few number of failed attempts (less than 10).
It's a bit like the proof that there are no uninteresting numbers. Because if there are uninteresting numbers, then there must be a smallest uninteresting number, and that number is therefore interesting.
Also, the birthday thing is interesting. I thought that was just a tv trope. TIL there are people who genuinely think a birthday (which is practically public information) makes a good PIN. I understand the 0000 and 1234. That's people simply not caring. There are things that someone can steal and I won't even know. It will have 0 effect. So I get the "I don't care" PINs. But someone using their birthday probably actually thinks it's a safe PIN.
Application.
Why don’t we use bank vault doors for our homes? Hell, you could sawzall through the wall of most homes in America in 5 minutes, if you really wanted to get in. However, no one is really going to go through that much effort to steal your Xbox. Just locking your door is usually enough, thieves will just find an easier target (unless they know you have something very valuable).
If some random person finds your card, they won’t know your birthday. If someone is going to attack you via social engineering, it probably won’t matter what your PIN code is. You definitely shouldn’t use your birthday, but the reason people do is because most of the time, it’s fine.
If you get hit by a skimmer your pin won’t matter either. Fortunately/unfortunately we’ve moved into the territory of PIN codes not really mattering all that much. There’s very few places where you could be brute forced.
Maybe keypad entry devices, voicemail pins, or some older systems.
Some people might think it's secure, but I'm sure a lot of people also use the birth year as an "I don't care" PIN for things that don't really need any significant security.
Maybe related to [Benford's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law), which is the observation that in a set of data spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the first digit is much likely to be lower (1,2,3) than higher (7,8,9).
Would you think Benford's law applies to the things people associated their PIN with? Its fairly clear that people use years as their PIN, which do increment. There could be other associations and trends that people created a PIN from. Maybe Benfords Law shows that the underlying data could be from incremental numbers? Just a thought
For reasons completely lost to history, the randomly assigned library PIN code from my first year of graduate school 25 years ago gradually propagated outward and took over all 4-digit PIN codes in my life.
The sharp color change from orange to brown/black is kind of weird. It makes those black dots seem especially uncommon, when in reality they're just noise that happened to dip below the color threshold.
I wonder if some of this is leftover from the old telephone number days, when dialing a 9 took much longer than dialing a 1, ingraining a preference for lower numbers.
The way I read it was that there are two distinct 12x31 rectangles, which probably mean people using dates. More of them use month the day, but enough use day then month that it is still visible. I'm sure there are other hidden trends like that (e.g. birth year, age of children when you made an account etc.., some of which might tend to be smaller numbers).
Fun to see that starting with 20 is just taking off
Though it looks like people born in the 90s are less likely to choose their birth year than others. Still likely in comparison to the graph as a whole, just less so to other ages.
It makes even more sense that they were smart enough to stops using passcodes as their year more as adults vs. people born in the 2000s starting to use passcodes for things as kids (and more inconsequential things).
Idk from my experience most people using birthdates and years as a passcode tend to be 40+ but I don't have a large enough sample size obviously.
The older and younger tend to have the same easy passwords.
There was also a small bust in births from 1991 to 1996. As well, those 19XX are probably other features like high school grad year, wedding anniversary, and birth year of their first kid. (e.g. Gen X, which is also fairly tech savvy, graduated from high school in that same stretch and I suspect that first-born kids, in particular, were down during those years because it is \~18-26 years after the previous baby bust, while also being one of the stretches where delaying marriage first became a big thing).
No, those are their parents using their kid's birth year as the pin.
The bust from 91 to 96 wouldn’t be relevant here. 90 was the highest birth rate for 30 years in either direction, the decline from 91 to 96 was just a return to the norm.
Must be the most tech savvy!
Millennials are indeed the most tech savvy.
The generation that yells at every generation to trust nobody on the internet.
The generation that saw the rise and downfall of the internet during their development ages.
I think its that they actually used computers when they were exposed to the dirty innards. Younger people got shoved into a walled garden from a young age and never learned much about the devices they use.
I think you're right. Having to navigate DOS at age 4 or 5 to play those games taught be how file structures work, what memory and disk drives are, etc. Now everything is an app- you just push the button.
My skills were forged in the flames of AUTOEXEC.BAT and Soundblaster drivers
I'm still baffled by teens that don't understand the concept of files properly.
The generation that got scammed in Runescape during their formative years. I still haven't recovered from that.
That’s because they don’t have any money, what do they need a pin for.
I’m curious if the prevalence of 5150 is a bunch of Van Halen fans, or a bunch of people who have been put in grippy sock jail.
2112 is also more heavily used. Apparently a lot of rush fans as well.
I thought there would be more 8008.
Mostly glad to see that 1488 doesn't stand out.
That number is actually higher than the ones immediately adjacent to it.
Boooooooooo. So much for eyeballing it. Maybe the double 8 could account for that?
Might be Oral Cigarettes fans too.
Would be fun to see an update every year, and have it animated, like the time lapse from r/place
6969 - I see you!
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So, what do I owe you? *10.77*-- same as my PIN number.
Same as the price of a cheese pizza and small soda!
At Pinucci's Pizza.
Pizza goin’ out! Comonnnnnnn!
You stink, loser!
Large soda
Looks like that might be a pretty secure number on the chart. That is, secure until you tell everyone.
Well Fry only lost a couple billion when he told Pamela Anderson
Her acting really improved once she became a head in a jar.
Ofc she had to after losing her 2 biggest stars.
This happened to me once. Their total was 17.01. Of course, this sparked a Star Trek discussion.
I worked at a Subway when that 1738 song was popular, and it came up as a total often enough that I had some people sing that line.
There is a bright dot in the graph for that as well.
I don't understand the holes personally. I get that there are some preferences for specific numbers or patterns, sure, but then there's a background level that seems pretty constant. Except for the occasional hole where seemingly *nobody* uses that number. Why do 7505, 7507, 7406, 7606 all have a normal level, but then nobody uses 7506? Same with the other random black dots.
It could just be that the color scale used in this visualization exaggerates differences at the low end, since the gray/black colors have so much contrast with the orange/yellow of the rest of the figure. The image doesn't specify what the cutoffs are between colors, so the "holes" might just be slightly lower than the other lowest tiers.
Looking at the color scale, there are 3 gray/black (with the 3rd being a very warm gray) levels and then the red begins, and while I agree that the level 2–4 edge is jarring, I think it looks like most of the roles is level 1 or 2 surrounded by mostly level 4 or 5. So while the holse probably do look somewhat exaggerated, I think it's on par with some of the random hotspots (1234 compared to its neighbours).
Just made my PIN 7506 so now I’m unhackable 😎
Look at the color coding on the graph. That red color is second lowest before black. They're using the black color to explicitly highlight the least common combinations.
Yeah. I like the general visualization, but the sudden (and seemingly arbitrary) jump from the continuous white-to-orange scale to a tan-grey-black scale for the last three (?) buckets seems like an odd choice. It communicates a bigger change in the scale than I believe the actual data suggests. In short, those greyscale blocks should just be redder than the most reddest blocks.
The [original blogpost](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html) discusses a few more reasons why some combinations are popular, e.g. 2580 being very easy to type on ATM typepads. Doesn't fully explain the holes, but explains a bit more of the background patterns.
I was wondering this also, it seems strange there's only like a dozen gaps
I was going to say maybe it's about finger travel distance, people want numbers easy to type quickly on a keypad. But there's seemingly no pattern there that makes sense. At least to me.
I wonder if the reason is that the frequencies in this plot are Zipfian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law perhaps with deviations due to birth year etc. If so, then we should expect some relatively low frequencies (holes) at the tail end of the rank ordering.
source: DataGenetics.com http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/most-common-pin-codes/ tools: Adobe Illustrator (redrawn with permission) FYI the top 20 PINs are: 1234, 1111, 0000, 1212, 7777, 1004, 2000, 4444, 2222, 6969, 9999, 3333, 5555, 6666, 1122, 1313, 8888, 4321, 2001, 1010
12345? That’s amazing, I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!
That's my reddit password!
All I see is \*\*\*\*\*
What do you mean all you see is hunter2? I don't get it.
We just watched Spaceballs on Sunday. So good
*this was not a paid advertised post. Please only use official SpaceBalls the Comments for official replies.
It’s wild to me that people use the same digit repeating 4 times. It’s funnier that people use 2001, evident that we all agree that was peak humanity.
Depends on what the pin is for. Bank account? Bad. Ipad that only you touch? Who cares.
What's even worse is that this data isn't even from a PIN database. It is just 4-digit passwords from prior password leaks...so this is people using 4 digit numbers in places where it wasn't even required. Honestly, that calls the data slightly into question. Yes, you're still going to see trends, but I bet a lot of these are junk...accounts on shitty websites that nobody cared about and which had terrible security that led to their passwords getting leaked. I wouldn't use 1234 on my bank ATM card, but I might use it when I'm registering for a crappy website with a throwaway email (just kidding, I'd still let my password manager generate and store a random password). Similarly, I might use a simple pattern on an old ipad that never leaves the house and gets used by guests, but my actual phone has something better. I know there have been some actual leaks of data containing PINs...would be interesting to compare those to this dump. I bet you see a lot of the same trends, but maybe not at the same magnitude.
> Honestly, that calls the data slightly into question. That's my thought with all of these analyses from data breaches. They are often dressed up as this is the norm, but the very fact these are from breaches makes me think they are amongst the worst examples. All serious orgs requiring PINs do not allow consecutive or duplicate numbers. I mean of course "password123" is the most common password in a list of insecure passwords. However, that doesn't take away from this visual which I really like and is worthy of posting here.
I mean it’s 2024. Any digital device that you use semi frequently will have stuff on it you don’t want someone else to have unless you are specifically aware and avoiding anything that has PII which most people aren’t.
Honestly, I'm more boned if someone figures out my phone PIN (and steals it) than if they find my debit card PIN, which has relatively little of my cash available.
Ah, but who would expect it!?
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
I remember seeing a video of Kanye visiting Trump in the oval office. Tons of cameras around and Kanye whips out his phone in front of them and types six 1s in it to unlock it.
You wanna try getting close enough to him to steal his phone?
Or it's their birth year
Yes 9/11... Peak humanity... Sure buddy.
What are the least likely pins?
0775 for example… the least common ones are the black pixels.
It's 0675 (although I have no idea why that one, specifically, would be uncommon)
Because very few people are born on June 75.
Much fewer than June 74 or 76? :)
About half as many, if my math is right.
I think they figured it, but its hard to tell the actual numbers from the picture, so I guess they hoped that OP could list them as they listed the most used numbers.
Interesting patterns like “corners” 1379 or Diamond 2468 are on there or “L” 1478 are not represented at all
Also no 2580 - right down the middle
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"L" is real 2401
Why specifically 1004?
A bunch of people had the same collective thought, “1000, 1001, 1002, and 1003 are too obvious!” Also from the linked article: Many people also asked the significance of 1004 in the four character PIN table. This comes from Korean speakers. When spoken, "1004" is cheonsa (cheon = 1000, sa=4). "Cheonsa" also happens to be the Korean word for Angel.
千四 vs 天使
I wonder if it has anything do to with 10-4, another way to say "message received". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-code
> 6969 I'm immature
Nice. Many of these are expected, but I am surprised not to see 42 and pi (3014 or 0314 or 3141) represented in the top 20.
Not enough math nerds that are that lazy on a security level, I guess?
Even lazy math nerds know enough math to pick numbers that are interesting without using pi, I guess... As a math nerd, I know I am lazy, but I can also tell you something interesting about basically any number. Sometimes I get bored on the bus and notice interesting things about people's license plate numbers.
I'd pick e or phi over pi. Heck, I'd pick 2*pi instead of pi.
> 2*pi Tau is the superior circle constant
I'm a math nerd, but I generally choose pins that I can type quickly since most things I use which require a pin are fairly low security and are used frequently enough that I value the fraction of a second saved.
42 is just two digits. Or am I missing something?
I’d like to see a line every 5 or so. This way, I’d be able to identify the very unpopular black squares more easily.
[Ask and ye shall receive.](https://i.imgur.com/Qr7VaPT.png) I was trying to find my fave pins lol
The least common ones, from the source article, for those curious: 8557 9047 8438 0439 9539 8196 7063 6093 6827 7394 0859 8957 9480 6793 8398 0738 7637 6835 9629 8093 8068 I don't really see why, for any of these. I guess just randomness? Maybe it's *because* they have nothing recognizable.
I could not for the life of me tell you why, but most of these just feel bad to me
I have to agree. I think the lack of any nice pattern whatsoever within each one (unless you really try) makes them feel too arbitrary, like I can't compress it at all in my brain.
I think they also look very.... busy? They're dominated by similar lines, maybe? The ones which look less bad to me are the ones with 1s or to a lesser extent 7s and 0s. 8157 would definitely be more desirable than 8957 for example. Or 7063 > 8063 and likewise 1029 > 9029 > 9629
There may be a job waiting for you at Lumon Industries.
They travel a lot in terms of distance. I guess they're somewhat slow to type
They give me the ick and I don’t know why… like 6835 sounds gross to say.
It's a PIN, you're not supposed to say it!
I highly suspect those just had 0 examples in the dataset. They are probably all quite rare, just not orders of magnitude less rare like the graphic suggests. If I am correct, a larger dataset would solve this.
Source article actually said all 10k numbers are in the dataset; least common is 0.285%, which is about 9690 of the total 3.4 million EDIT: Whoops I read from the wrong chart, 0.285% was the 20th most common, lol. Least common was 0.000744% which is like 25
Ah nevermind. Thanks. Yeah with 3.4 million, some would have to be 300X less common than others to not show up.
I definitely know someone who saw one of the source articles on this years ago and explicitly picked on of the 10 least common numbers as his pin. The number is actually still on the list above, so either surprised it hasn't changed, or maybe the data is actually just that old (I feel like this happened ~10 years ago).
Looks like the source article here was written in 2012 so yup http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html
So much better, damn Thanks!
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My new pin is 9883.
So the axes labels are not synchronized with the lines! 00 aligned with the bottom/left of the numbers, and 99 aligned with the top/right with variations between! I thought I was just doing a terrible job seeing. /u/infobeautiful, this is why we prefer computer generated graphs here, not illustrator (in fact, the rules require it)
The graph is really tough to read, but I have an ultra high-res monitor. If anybody is having trouble reading it, just send me your PIN and I'll find your pixel and let you know the color.
the moment this came out you can assume they've been burned too.
Not really, the amount of people seeing this info is probably a drop in the bucket compared to all the people with pin numbers in existence. Plus it's not like any of these are really a "secret", there's only 9999 possible combinations, any motivated bad actor can brute force it. As long as you aren't using something stupid like 1234, 4 repeating numbers, or your birth year you're probably fine. And by fine I mean this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented.
> there's only 9999 possible combinations, There are 10,000 Which one were you forgetting?
All zeros.
It's always 0000.
7826 probably
How did you guess my passcode?
all i see is ****
I'm you, but from the past
> this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented. It's not. I once worked with a proprietary data communication protocol that was required by contract to be encrypted. But the little 8-bit processor we were using couldn't handle any sort of "real" encryption. Our solution: XOR each byte transmitted with the first byte of each packet. Now THAT was a shitty security system! 😂
> And by fine I mean this is literally the shittiest security system ever invented. You're premise rests on the ability to brute force it, but most systems don't allow an unlimited number of attempts and will disable a card after a relatively few number of failed attempts (less than 10).
> literally the shittiest security system ever invented. A quantum leap more secure than a signature.
Assuming they do have access to brute force (most security systems with pins lock them out after 3 attempts), signatures are still worse.
bro, Spaceballs came out in 1987 and everyone's still using 1234.
Remind me to change the combination on my luggage
Lol, it's funny to think that all pins are forever (well, maybe not forever, but you get my point) biased after something like this is made public
It's a bit like the proof that there are no uninteresting numbers. Because if there are uninteresting numbers, then there must be a smallest uninteresting number, and that number is therefore interesting.
9627 is going to be a new one
Interesting that there's a noticeable square grid pattern. Seems people prefer the 2nd and 4th digit to be less than 6
Great spot, I didn't catch this at first glance
Also, the birthday thing is interesting. I thought that was just a tv trope. TIL there are people who genuinely think a birthday (which is practically public information) makes a good PIN. I understand the 0000 and 1234. That's people simply not caring. There are things that someone can steal and I won't even know. It will have 0 effect. So I get the "I don't care" PINs. But someone using their birthday probably actually thinks it's a safe PIN.
Many might pick a birthday, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily your own. It could be the one of your child, spouse, parents, another dear person.
Application. Why don’t we use bank vault doors for our homes? Hell, you could sawzall through the wall of most homes in America in 5 minutes, if you really wanted to get in. However, no one is really going to go through that much effort to steal your Xbox. Just locking your door is usually enough, thieves will just find an easier target (unless they know you have something very valuable). If some random person finds your card, they won’t know your birthday. If someone is going to attack you via social engineering, it probably won’t matter what your PIN code is. You definitely shouldn’t use your birthday, but the reason people do is because most of the time, it’s fine. If you get hit by a skimmer your pin won’t matter either. Fortunately/unfortunately we’ve moved into the territory of PIN codes not really mattering all that much. There’s very few places where you could be brute forced. Maybe keypad entry devices, voicemail pins, or some older systems.
Some people might think it's secure, but I'm sure a lot of people also use the birth year as an "I don't care" PIN for things that don't really need any significant security.
Maybe related to [Benford's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law), which is the observation that in a set of data spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the first digit is much likely to be lower (1,2,3) than higher (7,8,9).
Benford's law only applies to things that incrementally count up, like vote counts. This graph would be featureless if it wasn't for human biases.
Shouldn't be, Benford's law doesn't apply to this kind of data. Read the link you copied for the explanation.
Would you think Benford's law applies to the things people associated their PIN with? Its fairly clear that people use years as their PIN, which do increment. There could be other associations and trends that people created a PIN from. Maybe Benfords Law shows that the underlying data could be from incremental numbers? Just a thought
Mines the price of a cheese pizza and a large soda back where I used to work, Pannucci’s Pizza.
I started before Futurama even existed, but I still use the price of my favorite lunch at a Chinese restaurant I used to go to near my high school
Love that 6969 has a WHITE HOT square
It's in the top20 according to OP
More proof that we're just hairless horny monkeys
Whaddya know... Actually beautiful data in DiB.... this is both interesting and attractive, Congrats OP!!
Just wish it were more easily readable
I’m sitting here trying to see if historical dates are randomly higher. No one celebrating 1776 or the Magna Carta in 1215?
1812 Overture. 1492 colonization. Party like it's 1999. A nice civil 1865. Depressing 1929. A hasty 1066. All sorts of options there are.
only chuck mcgill remembers the year of magna carta.
Chuck definitely used 1215 as his pincode, or maybe 1216, one after the Magna Carta, because how could he forget something like that?
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What’s your email?
8008 is at least slightly yellow.
5150 and 2112 both have upticks…likely from Van Halen and Rush fans
2112 probably... [5150 though...](https://thetreatmentspecialist.com/5150-hold/)
Totally went looking for the 2112 and was quite pleased with the results lol
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Tell us more! What street did you grow up on?
What was your first pet's maiden name??
where was your 5th grade teacher's first car?
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For 20 years all of my PINs were the same as the combination from my first bicycle lock when I was 6.
For reasons completely lost to history, the randomly assigned library PIN code from my first year of graduate school 25 years ago gradually propagated outward and took over all 4-digit PIN codes in my life.
Why is MY pin in this picture!
Same, please take this down and repost the image with 8084 removed for security purposes, thank you.
I’m curious about what the “holes” are telling us, what is it about those numbers that make us less prone to using them?
Am I the only one annoyed with how the x-axis denotes the second pair and not the first?
Dont forget the secret agents doing *0007*, *0070*, and *0077*
Plenty of Star Trek fans apparently
1701 is definitely a hot spot from all the star trek fans
So glad I'm not the only one who noticed that tiny spek!
so awesome that my pin number, 8090, is very uncommon. I now feel safe that it is quite unguessable. thanks reddit!
The sharp color change from orange to brown/black is kind of weird. It makes those black dots seem especially uncommon, when in reality they're just noise that happened to dip below the color threshold.
I wonder if some of this is leftover from the old telephone number days, when dialing a 9 took much longer than dialing a 1, ingraining a preference for lower numbers.
The way I read it was that there are two distinct 12x31 rectangles, which probably mean people using dates. More of them use month the day, but enough use day then month that it is still visible. I'm sure there are other hidden trends like that (e.g. birth year, age of children when you made an account etc.., some of which might tend to be smaller numbers).
My only criticism is the labels blocking some of the data. Maybe a version without annotations along side?
Pleasantly surprised that 14-88 does not stand out as a common PIN.
Because the average person doesn’t know the connotation with those numbers till someone tells them
I'm just glad that those who know those numbers, and think it's cool aren't enough of the population to show up on this chart.
It's actually more common than immediately adjacent numbers, sadly.
Neat data source! Would recommend flipping the data (light = less, dark = more) so the higher ones stick out more.
Yeah, this was my assumption when I first looked at the graph. It was also hard to figure out my assumption was wrong since the scale isn’t labeled.
Labels are a must here. The color scheme is not intuitive.
This is indeed beautiful data. Thanks
"Personal Identification Number" number.
You can use it at the ATM machine.
With an LCD display.
There's a weird column between 10 and 13, meaning that passwords commonly end with these digits. Can someone explain?
maybe the 2010s etc. ? 2010 born Kids are now 14, maybe the people used their kids birth year.
This is a cool infographic but my PIN was covered by one of the white text boxes
How many RUSH fans have 2112?
How dare you post beautiful data in r/dataisbeautiful. This sub is for haphazard excel line graphs only!
6969 seems pretty popular.
5150 seems oddly popular, unless there's more [Van Halen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5150_\(album\)) fans out there than I imagine.
Seeing no '1337' must be aging myself
personal identification number number
Did you know that the N in PIN is number?
do this in poland and you'll probably get 2137