Not only does United Airlines require a set of security questions — which security experts have literally been advising against for decades now — but they actually manage to weaken the secret question system itself by not letting you choose your own answer. You can only pick from a pre-approved list of answers:
I can’t even.
(PS, FYI: document.getElementById('Questions_0__AnswerKey').options[Math.floor(Math.random()*document.getElementById('Questions_0__AnswerKey').length)].text)
Me, I like chocolate ice cream. Now you too can get into my “secure” account at Random Retailer, Inc.
Seriously. Why do I need an “account” at Random Retailer in the first place? Why can’t they take my payment information, send me the stuff and let it end there? Well, because they want to snarf all my personal information and sell it to someone, I assume.
I’m tired of having “accounts” all over the internet, I’m tired of ridiculous password requirements (“must contain an upper case letter, a lower case letter, a number and one more weird character like @” all to buy a widget in a one-time transaction) and I’m tired of passwords (which I invariably forget). Apparently the whole thing is ridiculously easy to hack into anyway.