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. 

Road Runner is putting ads in your DNS

As a sign of the times, my cable modem Internet service from Time Warner's Road Runner now is serving a Yahoo search page instead of generating a proper DNS error when you mistype a web page URL. If you're on Road Runner, try clicking on this link as an example. 

Network Solutions tried this a few years ago and got so much bad press that the canned the program within a short period of time.

While I was initially frustrated by this, I was happy and impressed to see the opt-out link at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the opt-out brought me to a page that allowed me to turn this off and go back to the standard (and proper) behavior.

If you use Road Runner, I recommend you click on this link and opt-out now.

Clicking on the opt-out link takes you to this preferences page:

After opting-out, your error page should look like this:

Facebook will be making your fan pages public

I recently saw a notice in Facebook warning me that sometime soon the companies, products and people I'm a "fan" of in Facebook will be made public in search results. I'm not sure that I see the user benefit here, but the obvious marketing benefit is to raise awareness of fan pages and get more people to become fans of more things.

You can opt-out of this by unchecking the box in your privacy settings. But it looks like it will be turned on for everyone by default (and retroactively for existing users).