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It's not just Google. My wife's wallet was stolen recently while we were out of town, leaving us with a single uncompromised credit card with which to get thro

by lisper 4y ago

It's not just Google. My wife's wallet was stolen recently while we were out of town, leaving us with a single uncompromised credit card with which to get through the rest of the trip. A few days later, I got a call from the credit card company asking me to contact them. Apparently they thought there was suspicious activity on this card. I have email notifications enabled for all my cards so I knew that all the recent transactions were legit, and so I called thinking that all I would need to do was confirm that. When I called, they started asking me a bunch of weird questions about previous addresses in order to verify my identity. I have been at the same address for 12 years. It turned out that they had contracted with a third party to do identity verification, and this third party had incorrect information. But of course they would not tell me who the third party was (I still don't know) or how I could get the mistakes fixed. I was unable to authenticate myself to their satisfaction, despite the fact that I had access to the on-line account and I could tell them the date and amount of every single transaction on the account. I was livid because I was convinced they were going to shut down the account, leaving me with no working cards several thousand miles from home. Fortunately, they did not shut down the account. Instead, they mailed me a physical letter with a four-digit PIN, which I was able to used several weeks later to authenticate myself and get the account cleared. I never found out what happened to get the account flagged in the first place. Since then my wife and I have reviewed our security processes and in addition to having half a dozen backup cards (no exaggeration) we now make sure that we never keep more than three of them in the same physical location in order to avoid a repeat of that situation. I'm a little surprised there aren't more horror stories about people getting stuck in places if their wallet gets stolen on a trip. We got very, very lucky that not all of our cards were in my wife's wallet.

mindslight 4y ago
I reject the use of surveillance based authentication. I do not consent to my information being used in this way, nor it being stored in those surveillance databases in general. And I certainly do not want to confirm their records. When confronted with it, I generally answer the questions without using any personal knowledge - either choosing none of the above or doing web searches for questions like what city is Foo St in. This works about half the time (demonstrating the uselessness of it), and the other half they can just send me a snail mail letter. (Of course this isn't really applicable to the situation you found yourself in, and I could see myself making the same compromise under duress. But speaking generally)

by lisper 4y ago

mindslight 4y ago

I reject the use of surveillance based authentication. I do not consent to my information being used in this way, nor it being stored in those surveillance databases in general. And I certainly do not want to confirm their records. When confronted with it, I generally answer the questions without using any personal knowledge - either choosing none of the above or doing web searches for questions like what city is Foo St in. This works about half the time (demonstrating the uselessness of it), and the other half they can just send me a snail mail letter. (Of course this isn't really applicable to the situation you found yourself in, and I could see myself making the same compromise under duress. But speaking generally)