It never should have been, that's what I'm saying. But for a long time if you could answer a question like "what street did you live on in 1996" or even the classic "what was your mother's maiden name" that could get you a password reset over the phone.
That era has to end if it hasn't already. Just because an unknown voice can answer questions about me doesn't mean it's me. And these days, you might not even be able to trust a voice-print.
All this "personal data" has to be made valueless. Then people will stop stealing it, and if they do, it won't matter.
Explain how that would have worked about 150 years ago? Being a stranger back then was far riskier in a lot of places and they'd have no idea if your identity was fake or not. Moving from these old systems to new digital systems was a slow process and even to today I see old people go into the DMV with out many life records and have issues because many of their state records are in storage on paper in some warehouse and not digitized.
Things of the past are to this day catching up with the future we live in.
Fair point, I was thinking of the relatively modern digital era. 150 years ago a person in Eastern Europe could not reset my bank account password remotely with a phone call.
But these huge data breaches have been happening for a few decades now. Pretty much anyone who's had any accounts with banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, utilities, or any online services has been included in one or more of them. It must be the assumption going forward that this information is no longer secret.
That era has to end if it hasn't already. Just because an unknown voice can answer questions about me doesn't mean it's me. And these days, you might not even be able to trust a voice-print.
All this "personal data" has to be made valueless. Then people will stop stealing it, and if they do, it won't matter.