I know next to nothing about computer security, so maybe there is something I'm missing here. What is the point of those security questions you have to choose on some services? I get that the idea is that the answer is something only I would know, but usually you can only pick a re-made question and none of the answers are secrets.
My mother's maiden name is not a secret, neither is the town I grew up in, and if you know the town you can also just try out all the elementary schools in it. Of course you could always provide a fake answer, but then you have to remember that one as well, giving you now effectively a second password to remember. That defeats the entire point of a secret question.
Unless I'm missing something, how did this retardation spread this much? Every time I sign in on eBay they want me to pick three questions. Luckily I have been able to put it off by closing the browser window, but I have also seen sites that won't let you proceed unless you pick your questions. Is this some sort of cargo cult where other tech companies are doing it, so you have to do it as well?
Lawyers. This shit was accepted pre-internet as a "we did all we could" for account security and there's decades of case law to make site owners feel safe.
Austin Clark
this is all jew tricks. From babylons 'magick' book. They need your mother's name to curse you.
The purpose of security question is to effectively give you a secondary, offline password which you don't use for day-to-day logins so less likely to be sniffed or stolen. The questions are quite old (pre-Google and pre-Facebook) and based on the assumption that people don't used to share the "secret answers". Although on a properly designed site the secret answers should not be stored in clear text, but hashed like regular passwords (except maybe case insensitive), there are many popular closed and open-source portals which do not follow good security practicies. It is not recommended to actually answer the question, but give a long, unique, non-identifying secondary password as an answer, which will only be used to recover your main password.
