Credit: unDraw

Security Check Required

Type this text so we know you’re not a robot

Joanna Ngai
Published in
2 min readJul 12, 2021

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Dear customer,

We’re stopping you from logging in because we’re not sure you are you. Though you’ve logged in at this exact time everyday for the past five years, we still need to make sure. Please type this phrase in the field below.

Now stand on one foot, close your eyes and re-type the same phrase in all caps using your forehead.

One more step — please complete this security check. Is this a picture of a bridge? A traffic light? A fire hydrant? Select the squares and we’ll tell you what you already know: your eyesight sucks.

You seem to get your own password wrong quite often. A real human wouldn’t make silly mistakes. A real human would be 99.99% accurate.

To confirm your identity, we just need a few pieces of information from you. Just send us a selfie, along with your social security number, birthday, bank account pin, mother’s maiden name and current location.

Don’t want to share? We completely understand.

This data may or may not leaked due to an unauthorized actor accessing our company database. Our decades-old security measures made a feeble attempt to…

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