HSBC voice recognition insecure?

I suppose it depends on your outlook on life. I walk my dog in the woods every morning, along with hundreds of others. Someone mentioned that a dog had been bitten by an adder. Some people immediately stopped letting their dogs roam lose and kept them on a lead. I weighed up the chances and let mine carry on as normal.
There will always be people who are so risk averse that it stifles their life.

mgdavid wrote: »

very hit and miss.
Firstly it requires the subject to be born in this country.
Second, it would appear to be a good reason for women to adopt husband's surname upon marriage, as without their maiden name they are untraceable.
Also anyone born or married since 1984 is safe as the records aren't there yet.
Then you need the middle name(s) and/or initials to reduce the number of hits.
And finally if there are multiple hits (as there will be for common names) you need to have knowledge of the approximate place of birth,
probably a 1 in 4 chance of locating it this way, at best.

I wouldn't disagree with most of what you say, but I was talking about many people, not everybody.

I also wouldn't use the word 'safe'. FreeBMD has the records going up to 1983, but commercial sites have later records which are easily accessible, often for free. These records cover the period for most people appearing on the GRO registers who will be old enough to have a bank account with likely amounts of money in them big enough to be attractive to fraudsters.

The marriage trick won't work either if the marriage appears on the GRO register then it is a relatively trivial exercise, in many cases, to find the marriage and work out the maiden name. Usually.

The marriage itself may provide the source of middlenames and/or initials.

If someone knows enough about you to identify your first and last names, year of birth, and who you bank with, then middlenames, quarter of birth, and even approximate location of birth may well be known already, or not that difficult to work out - especially for people who pass the time of day posting their life history on FB.

Only by having a very common surname and firstname, with no middlename, can you be relatively confident the GRO indexes will not help a fraudster identify your MMN.

True, you don't have to give your real MMN when registering with a bank, but how many people are aware of the risk, and how many people would feel uncomfortable about lying about a 'fact' the bank are asking them to provide as part of a financial application? It would be far better for the banks to restrict themselves to asking for a 'memorable name' rather than specifically MMN.

These news headlines are about the scenario in which someone who has a twin was able to partially fool a system. The number of people who can do that is miniscule in comparison to the number of people who have an easily identifiable MMN - and that was really my point, the banks ask for MMN yet we rarely see the same kind of loud headlines pointing out how insecure that piece of information might be.