Secret Questions?

We all know we live in a day and age when we have more passwords, usernames and pin numbers to remember than there are days in the year. Once upon a time, this wasn’t too difficult. Now, though, every password you make up has to have this, that or the other and can’t be like the last million passwords you forgot. Which is just helping us forget them again. (Hence, the sole reason I’ve changed my iTunes password twenty times in the last year.) I think hints like “one lower case, one upper case, one number, one special character, one letter from the obscure Phoenician alphabet” might be helpful underneath those boxes asking for your password. Because if I can’t even remember that, there’s no way I’ll come up with the right combination.

The other day, though, I had one that might just be the icing on the cake. I was in the midst of updating my boss’s tally of points on airlines, rental cars and hotels she’s registered with. It never fails that one of them is going to ask me to change a password. This time it was United Airlines. Okay, no big deal. Right? Well, then they ask for “secret questions”. And we’re not talking two or three…we’re talking five or six.

Now, first off, who wants to hack into United Airlines anyhow? Southwest maybe. United Airlines? Never. That being said, my boss never books her own travel (not business or personal) and really doesn’t care what her usernames or passwords are, so I knew it was left to me to answer these “secret questions” as best I knew how. Or not…

Yes, we all know that “secret questions” aren’t really secret at all. If someone hacked far enough into our account to get that far, they (like us) would see the questions in drop down boxes. Nothing secret about that. They should more accurately be called “secret answers” since those are what is supposed to be known to us alone. (Although if you named your first dog “Bozo”, there are probably quite a few people who remember that little fact.) But United Airlines decided to make the whole thing simple: not only are your “secret questions” in drop down boxes, but so are your “secret answers”.

I kid you not. This is how it went: What is your favorite dog breed? Followed by a drop down box of a whole list of possible answers. You could not answer with any honesty (unless you like the typical Golden Retrievers, Pit Bulls or Yorkshire Terriors). You couldn’t say Pughauhau, or Great Dane-oodle or whatever lovely made-up named mutt you have. Nor could you simply say “I hate dogs”. You had to choose.

And what if your first car was a Model T? Not on the list. Or your first house was purple? Sorry. Blue might be close enough. First major city you visited? Some of those cities listed I didn’t even know what country they were in and what if I had been a farm girl whose largest “city” was St. Cloud, Minnesota? Well, I’m simply out of luck.

To top it all off, I kept thinking this was supposed to help keep my boss’s “secret information” safe? A patient hacker would have only to run through all the possibly combinations for answers to eventually get to the right solution. And since that’s what hackers do anyhow…I can’t say I felt very safe. And this wasn’t even my account!

But don’t worry about it. I’m not. My boss hasn’t flown United since I started working there. Nor is she about to. We typically stick to Southwest. It’s easier to fly…and easier to login to!