The banks and credit card companies I do business with suffer from a series of fascinating delusions. The first has to do with my social security number. That number appears on countless documents at dozens of companies, but now companies pretend that my social security number is some sort of huge secret that only I know. They use it to authenticate me when I call — and now they only ask for the last four digits, as if though that enhances security. Well, just using the last four digits is useful: someone who wants to impersonate me has fewer digits to memorize.
But the other delusion is even funnier: they all seem to think my mother works for the CIA. Well, maybe that's not actually what's going on; but certainly they seem to think she has a secret identity. The believe that no one except me (and presumeably my siblings) know her maiden name. Even better, American Express recently asked me to enter my mother's birthday to use as a PIN number to access my online account — again, her birth date must be a huge secret, with steely-eyed CIA agents purging the public records of both our birth certificates. What is even more foolish (and opens a huge security hole) is that American Express won't let you select any other PIN number when you validate a new credit card; if you select a random number to use instead, they bounce you to a live operator.
To provide real security on some of my more important accounts, I've started using a different and random "mother's maiden name" for each account. In the meantime, unless your mother really does work for the CIA, please be aware that these questions about your Mom by the banks and credit card companies provide no actual security. A secret shared by dozens of different companies isn't very much of a secret.
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