Thursday 1 August 2013

The discourse of security questions

I had to fill in a whole new set of security thingies for a well known online credit card company. (Why?) Included in it were three security questions from a limited list. I've often felt a slight sense of dis-ease when doing things like this before, and today it suddenly struck me why. I did not have the happiest of childhoods. No abuse, not poor, nothing like that, just not happy, for a variety of reasons. And I prefer to forget the place where I was born, the first pet I had, what my mother's maiden name was. But nearly all the questions available pull me back to that time in such a way that you wonder if the people who choose these questions all had a Walton style upbringing (and are the kind of people who look back on their schooldays as the happiest days of their life, the poor disappointed souls). I wonder how many other people who are forced to choose from these daft questions feel the same. It's  almost worth researching, but I bet there's already a PhD somewhere on the discourses identifiable in security questions. In the end I told the truth:
Q: Place I was born A: I prefer to forget
Q: First teacher's name A: I really couldn't give a stuff
Q: First pet A: what business is it of yours?*

*No, I'm not so stupid as to tell you my real security questions.These are a simulacrum.

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