Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID
Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID
Are internet security and internet privacy incompatible goals?
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- Phone numbers
- social security numbers
Stop making personal information into digital ids because when it inevitably ends up in some kind of data breach. These companies all throw their hands up saying sucks to be you.
Nah, man. Gotta get my $2.97 check.
Yeah, just generate a unique ID and ask only for the information you actually need.
What I hate is when they want you to store "secret" information like your mother's maiden name/ first pet name for later verifications. You know these are stored in plain text of course. My own damn government does this stupid shit, and they've had several hacks of PII including gun registrations because as far as I can tell, nobody competent works in government IT.
I choose random questions and store the random passwords that I use as answers in my password manager. It's also more secure because people can't just Facebook stalk you for answers.
Security questions don't care what you put in there. It's not an exam. It's basically just an alt password.
I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I'm cooked anyway, so.
I use bullshit answers for these, and save them in the notes section of my password manager.