So I wanted to test some things with my Boost Mobile Motorola i730, but I haven’t used it in probably 6 months, so I had to reactivate my account. Welcome to American pre-paid, by the way, in Europe you can go for a year without losing your phone number and account balance. Here it’s common for 90 day maximums – I just had to do the same for my Virgin Mobile pre-paid phone as well.
Anyways, as I was going through the process over the phone, re-charging with my credit card, when the customer care rep said she needed to ask me some “security questions.” I figured she’d ask me my mother’s maiden name or the city where I was born or something, but after asking me for my date of birth and the last four digits of my social security number, she asks me to wait for a moment while the “system processes the info.” System? What system? Then after a moment she says something like, “Okay, these are based on your ‘background’,” and proceeds to ask me three multiple-choice questions. The first was innocuous: which county was such and such address found in. She gave me three possible answers and also a “I don’t recognize that address,” which I chose because either I lived on a Parkway at some point in my life and don’t remember it, or it was a dummy question.
But then it got really freaky. The second question was the “age range” of my a person named “Richard Beattie” and she gave me several choices (starting at age 45). Whaaaat? That’s my Dad! WTF? Then she asked for my brother’s age range as well (starting again, pretty close to the mark). You’ve *got* to be kidding me. This is the most obscene invasion of my privacy I’ve ever experienced from a random corporation that wasn’t a potential employer. How the hell do they know who my Dad and Brother are in the first place?
Now remember… Boost is a prepaid wireless service. Most people in the United States who go to prepaid for service do so either because of poor credit or the desire to remain anonymous. Well, the anonymity honeymoon is apparently over, folks.
Source: RussellBeatie.com via TechDirt