austinpreneur

We need new security questions - obscurity is no defense in the long tail of social networking

Everyone knows that financial institutions are behind the times with technology and are way too paranoid to participate in social media. But it seems like they aren't paying enough attention to social media and the trend to publish more and more information publicly that use to be private.

If you're friends with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn and troll through their Twitter and Flickr feeds, you'll find that you can answer most of the typical "security questions" for financial institutions. They picked obscure questions such as, "What was the name of your first pet?" and "What street did you live on in your first house?" thinking that they would be difficult for someone other than you to figure out. But these days most of the questions are pretty easy to figure out for a social media sleuth.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger. With hundreds of millions of people using social networking it is clear that its not just a fad. The generation of tomorrow will grow up without many of inhibitions that we have about sharing information about ourselves publicly. Today your photos, your day to day activities and your relationships with others are available to the world through Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The trend is to share more not less, so what else will be shared tomorrow?

I think this is a real concern! This is ripe for abuse and needs to be addressed proactively by financial institutions before clever social media criminals expose this common vulnerability for rampant identity theft.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Lie. Come up with alternate answers to the common security questions such as "what is your home town?" and always use the fake answer that only you know (after all, you've always wanted to be from the Bronx, haven't you?). That way even your mom can't figure out your security questions. 

I want an eye.fi card that works in reverse (thanks @egoh)

This morning I was tweeting about how much I love the digital picture frame in my office. 

 

The reason I'm loving it is because I just put new pictures on it. The problem is that it's hard to get pictures onto the digital picture frame - it has an SD card that I need to pop out, take home, copy new photos onto, and bring back.

What I really want is a picture frame that downloads new pictures wirelessly from my Facebook account - including my own pictures as well as those of my friends (similar to what Chirp does on my desktop). There is a Y Combinator company called PicWing that does this, but I'm hesitant to get tied into a proprietary platform.

Eric Goh had the great suggestion of trying to use an Eye-Fi in reverse. An Eye-Fi is an SD card with a wireless chip in it so that it can upload pictures to your computer or the Internet wirelessly (the good ones geotag the photos with GPS too). What I really want is one that works in reverse, downloading pictures automatically to whatever picture frame I put the SD card into.

Great presentation on Agile programming by Alan Cooper

Thanks to Jason Stoddard for sharing this link with me. Alan gave the closing keynote at the Agile 2008 conference and this is a link to his presentation deck and the notes that accompany them. It's worth reading and sharing with your non-Agile believers!

The Richter Scales sing the Startup Depression

Here is a funny spoof by the Richter Scales about the startup depression. It was performed at the Crunchies awards this year.

What if your email account got deleted?

TechCrunch reported that a blogging site called JournalSpace lost all of its customers data. It sounds like their database crashed and they didn't have any good backups. What a nightmare!

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you lost access to your email account? What if you logged into your Gmail account one day only to find that all of your email messages were gone? Or what if you just couldn't remember your password and the password reminders went to an old email address? It is also quite plausible that your account could be incorrectly suspended for abuse (the bad guys also try to make it look like someone else).

I use Google Docs, and I have a number of important documents up there that would be quite painful to lose. A few times, I've logged in only to see a warning that my documents weren't available. I almost had a heart attack! Fortunately it wasn't long before they re-appeared.

What about your photos? I have the master copy of all my photos on my local hard drive, I back them up with Time Machine on my Mac, and I also upload them to Amazon S3 with JungleDisk. So I feel pretty safe. But I have heard of lots of people who start out with their photos on their computer and on Flickr, but then their computer crashes and Flickr becomes the master copy. What if your Flickr account got deleted along with all of your photos? Or what if they just decided your pictures were obscene and took down your account?

Have you ever lost something important that you assumed was safe "in the cloud"? Have you heard of any major websites losing customer data?