Vanguard: security questions on set-up

[coppertop]

I've had my own Vanguard retirement account for years now and also have my husband as a joint owner on a taxable account.  We want to set up a Roth for my husband and this morning I went on line to do just that.  Went through the normal questions:  name, address, SSN and eventually got to "security questions."  We were a bit shocked.  The first question named my husband's mother and we had to click from several choices which month she was born.  My husband's mother does not even have a Vanguard account and it's a bit disconcerting that Vanguard could just reach into its database and pull out her name and birthdate like that.  The questions went on to having us click which of various companies he had worked for and some addresses where he had lived - and this reached back to the 1980s.  The final question was a real shocker - my husband has an estranged 31-year-old daughter whom we know has bought a house with her boyfriend, but we have no idea of her address or even what town it is in.  The question was which town (Daughter's Name) owns a house in and a bunch of possibilities, the final one being "I do not know this person."  We had no alternative but to hit this last choice, as we were afraid that to answer it incorrectly might result in his account being rejected.  Wow.  It's scary to be hit in the face with just how much information is out there that companies like Vanguard can access with just the bare-bones information about you.  For sure I don't like it - while at the same time realizing that this is the world we now live in.

[dude]

100% of that information can be gotten from the credit reporting agencies -- and that's likely exactly where it came from.  Yeah, kinda creepy, but an unavoidable fact of modern life it seems.

[coppertop]

I had no idea they could so easily come up with the names of your closest relatives like that. 

Several years back, I got my report from Experian and was quite surprised to see my records intermingled with my ex's and his present wife.  Makes for some strange bedfellows.

[dude]

ha!  yeah, I've gotten some of those security questions asking about residences and such from like 20 years ago, and I'm like, "huh?  How am I supposed to remember THAT?!"

[coppertop]

What really got me was seeing his daughter's name come up and the fact that we would be expected to know where she is living - there are lots of families that have lost track of each other and don't know where others are living.  It would seem that the Vanguard database knows more about his child than he does.  It's a terribly sad situation but not all that uncommon. 

[Spork]

I don't think you have to answer 100% correctly.  They'll let you miss one or so.  I've had them where all 4 of my choices were just wrong... and it still verified me okay.

[FIRE me]

I've run in to this kind of thing a few times. I always tell the company involved that I will answer reasonable questions about myself, but I will answer no questions at all regarding my relatives.

[Frankies Girl]

I have seen these types of questions before on banking and once on an unclaimed property site... not sure why anyone would be surprised by this any more. Your information - addresses, applying for mortgages or car payments or any of that stuff - is going to be in your credit history and it's a pretty nifty way to try to easily identify you as who you say you are.

I haven't lived at the same address as my sister in over 30 years and we have completely different last names and don't even live in the same state, and yet if I did a search, I can find records on the regular web stuff linking me as a relative just because at one time we did live in the same house and they can extrapolate that we're siblings from age and other identifying factors.

In one way, it's pretty cool, but in another, it's pretty darned scary.

[former player]

There's been a big fuss in the UK recently (pre-Paris) about the government having powers to look at electronic records (email contacts but not content, website addresses) for the purposes of security/terrorism investigations.  The commentaries I've seen about it completely ignore that we let commercial firms have this information all the time with far fewer safeguards and means of redress.