Woot!
I appear to have won a camera[1] -the star letter in PC Pro this month is mine. The following is the letter I sent, you’ll have to read the magazine for the edited version:
Regarding your article on identity theft, if it is known that 80% of people are willing to give away information commonly used by companies to determine identity then wouldn’t it be more useful to change the attitude of the companies involved as to what information is really secret? I’ve long believed two of my bank’s secret questions are more secure than the rest because they are more open to creative answers, for instance “A special date” and “A special name”, whereas questions that ask for specifics are just asking for trouble “First School”, “Last School”, “Mother’s Maiden Name” etc. People are obviously free to lie about the specifics, but I suspect most don’t.
There are items on your personal information checklist which are easy to discover about people with slightly uncommon names. For example, since the register of births since 1984 is freely available online, the mother’s maiden name of most people in Britain born after 1984 (the core social networking generation) is easy to find. Anybody running a service relying on Mother’s maiden name as an even vaguely secure piece of information is fooling themselves and quite possibly their customers.
[1] A Canon Digital Ixus 60 - review
Edit (15-Oct-2007): I think I must have read the next month’s star prize bit and thought that was what I was going to win, since what I have actually been sent is an Epson Stylus Photo RX585 (an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier - I already have an RX420, but this looks better).
Tags: luck