Who Am I?

Apparently I Don’t Know Myself

“Digital Privacy” has been a big issue lately. However, we also have the opposite issue: how do we prove who we are online?

Yesterday I was required to prove who I am. I failed.

The situation is that I’ve just sold my home and I want to be paid. The title company had sent a notary to my home, I provided her with my driver’s license as further confirmation that I’m the correct person and I provided her with my bank account information in writing (printed in nice large 20 point font size to make it easy to read) so that they could deposit the money.

Yesterday, without advance notice, I was sent a text “click here to verify your identity”. The name of the title company they referenced didn’t match the name of the title company I’ve been working with. Having worked in cyber security for over thirty years, I was of course skeptical so I contacted the person, I had been working with at the title company, to verify this wasn’t a scam. She assured me it wasn’t and in the meantime I received an email with the same link to verify my identity.

At this point they have essentially second factor identified me by the combination of knowing my email address and my phone number. But that’s not good enough! I have to take a quiz to prove that I am myself!

Even worse was that to take their quiz I was required to disable the security on my computer. For a cyber security guy, that’s about the equivalent of a strip search at an airport!

After asking me my social security number, height (as stated on my driver’s license) and other basic information, we moved on to the trivia quiz.

The trivia questions on the quiz were ridiculous. I really wish I had taken a screenshot, but I didn’t imagine failing and I just wanted my money. Since I was busy working it didn’t have my full attention.

All of the questions were multiple choice with four options and a fifth “none of the above”. Two of the questions were a list of four colleges, that I’d never heard of, asking which I had attended. This of course primed me for believing that “none of the above” was a common correct answer. They never asked me about the college I actually did attend!

The question that I believe tripped me up was “What was the color of your 1983 Honda?”. Currently I drive a black 1996 Honda so I was puzzled what they were asking about and answered “none of the above”. It wasn’t until I had failed their test that it occurred to me that they were asking about a junker car that I drove briefly in 1994. Of course I have no idea what color that car was. I don’t have a photographic memory. All I remember about that car was that the floorboard was rusted out, you could see the pavement below you and the brakes were dangerously close to failing. Who cares what the color was? Why would anyone remember that?

So that’s it, no second chance, I’ve failed, I’m not me.

What baffles me is why this digital trivia quiz takes priority over face to face identification with a notary? Sure, it’s a good thing that they double check on a transaction this large. I don’t want them sending several hundred thousand dollars to the wrong person. But this isn’t a security check before pushing the button to start a nuclear war. This is a real estate transaction and these must happen daily all across the USA.

Of course they will pay me, but now they are mailing a check (we all know how reliable the post office is!) instead of direct depositing it. Adding insult to injury is all this hassle when the bank financing the buyer’s loan is the same bank I’m paying off. They literally only need to move the money from one account to another! It doesn’t even need to touch another financial institution.

So I will have to take the check physically to another bank, deposit it, wait for it to clear, transfer it to the bank it came from, wait for that to clear and then pay off my mortgage. That delay I calculate will cost me about $300 in extra interest.

Let’s stop for a moment and go back to the trivia they ask in order to prove that you are yourself. Another question was remembering an address I lived at briefly over thirty years ago. I’m sure I did get that one correct but that would have been easy to have mistaken too!

Where did they get all this trivia about me? Well, no doubt they bought it from the “data brokers” who we are all fighting to try and maintain our right to privacy online instead of having every detail of our lives tracked and sold.

Heck, they could have asked “How much tea did you purchase in 2015?”. I could have checked my history with Amazon and accurately answered that!

Once I went on a first date (a bit over ten years ago) and she told me how much money I made. She had done a background check before the date. She was wrong. I intentionally don’t correct the data brokers mistakes because I don’t want the entire world to know accurately every detail of my life. I prefer to have the world thinking that I make less than half as much as I actually earn. My ego doesn’t need stroking by having a data broker announce to the world, “Hey, this guy makes a good income.”

Thus I would insist that it is not an accurate way to identify someone by questioning ancient trivia about them which was purchased from a data broker.

To end this, I’d like to circle back to ask what has gone wrong with humanity that a digital trivia quiz is trusted over a face to face meeting with a human notary in your own home?

Edit:
Yet another problem with online authentication being required to prove we are ourselves, from another person:

“My Apple account is attached to my late husband’s email, which is no longer in service.

For some reason the App Store no longer recognizes my password, and in order to change the password they send the link to his non-existent email.

Even to change the email, they want to send a confirmation to his email.

So I’m stuck.”