Saturday, April 26, 2014
Wells Fargo uses upside-down name tags to draw attention to identity theft
Last week, at Wells Fargo, I noticed that clerks were
wearing their name tags upside down.
They said that this was a gimmick to draw attention to identity theft
protection plans.
I got around to doing the free annual credit report Friday,
and found no problems. All three bureaus
ask multiple choice questions about the distant past in doing identity
verification. TransUnion actually ask
the trade name of my “publishing company” back in early 2000 that carried my
first “Do Ask, Do Tell” book and my “Our Fundamental Rights” book, as a multiple
choice question. The answer was “High Productivity Publishing.”
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Metro Transit machine eating debit cards -- another security problem?
Last night, I had a misadventure in at Metro Center, in the
Washington DC Metro, adding to my smartcard.
That is, the card reader ate my debit card. I had to wait forty minutes for a technician
to come to open the machine and get the card out.
It turns out there was a regular ticket below the debit
card, so apparently the magnetic ticket messed up the machine. That raises the idea that a thief might
insert thin paper cards in the credit and debit card receptacles, with the idea
of returning and somehow getting the debit cards out and using them.
Curiously, the machine did not even go out of order, fooling other consumers.
I was on the way home.
Had I been on the way to a paid event, I would have had to either
forfeit the ticket or leave the debit card at risk until I could get it
canceled on a computer. I’m not set up
yet to do this on a mobile phone. Maybe
I should be.
Monday, April 07, 2014
Biometric validation, even heart rhythm, could replace passwords with online processing, stopping a lot of identity theft cold
Websites in the future may turn to biometric validation
rather than passwords, as a way to protect against hackers and particularly identity
theft.
CNN has a big story here.
Four of these are ear shape, typing speed, facial
recognition (in use at some facilities), and walk or gait. One could add retinal scans to that, which is coming into use (and is sometimes
shown in the movies). It’s hard to see
how walk or typing speed could be unique enough.
But the most curious innovation is to use heart beat or
electrocardiography for identification. The CNN story shows a wristwatch,
rather light and narrow, from Bionym, with the "Getnymi" website here for pre-order.
There is smartphone electrocardiography, but I’m amazed that
one could identify a person from their heart dynamics with a tiny sensor
underneath a wrist. Maybe a sensor held
on the neck near the carotid artery could make sense. Typically, a medical electrocardiogram
requires 10-12 leads, including 6-8 in the chest area, although sometimes
only 2 or 3 are used, as for conscious
sedation during long dental procedures. Heart
rate and rhythm vary with activity and body chemistry. It’s hard to believe that it can be
unique. Sometimes heart patients are
monitored for a few days with a Holter device, which requires shaving the chest
before. It’s curious that the video
shows a hairy man as the actor.
This little technological development should be watched to
see if it is for real. But the medical
questions make me wonder.
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