Privacy concerns about SMS-based two-factor authentication

admin
2015-04-20T21:50:00+00:00

Imagine these conversations:

Them: "Hi, we are a marketing and advertising company that makes money selling your information. Can we have your cell phone number?"
You: "Over my cold dead body, jerk"

Them: "Know how all these websites are losing your passwords? We can fix that if you give us your cell phone number!"
You "Here it is!"

Yahoo has rolled out two-factor authentication for its services using SMS. Again, SMS is more secure than passwords so that's good, but it has many issues.. If you are a consumer and a website loses your password, it's a big pain. You should change all your passwords. If a website loses (or sells) your cell number what will happen? You will get so much spam that your phone becomes useless.

Even without getting lost, your cell phone number is gold to marketers. Open rates for txt messages are 98%! (Just google it, I don't want that traffic). Of course they are, because most of it is not spam, not yet. Of course, the carriers can help with this: AT&T has a program called Smart Limits that only costs $4.99 per month.

With all the options for two-factor authentication today rolling out SMS just seems like choosing the option that is potentially the worst for the consumer.