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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

I never quite got this "mother's maiden name" thing. Isn't your mother's maiden name... your mother's current name, minus the extra surname she got when she married? Why is this treated as a hard-to-discover information?

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"Mothers maiden name" has been used in over-the-counter banking as an authentication secret for over a century (1882 first mention[0])

Likewise DOB and SSN have been long established as auth secrets.

They never should have survived the transition to the internet

[0] http://splinternews.com/your-mothers-maiden-name-has-been-a-...

In the US and other countries it's common for a wife to take her husband's last name.

Changes from "Jane Doe" to "Jane Smith"

I think he's saying the maiden name is easily found. At least in Brazil, the husband's surname is _appended_ at the end, doesn't replace the maiden one: Jane Doe Smith.

Yeah, but often (usually?) the woman's maiden name replaces her middle name. E.g. Jane Elizabeth Doe -> Jane Doe Smith. I'm pretty sure my mom's maiden name is printed on her driver's license, paper checks, etc.

I know very few women that have done that TBH.

Maybe you just didn't realize it, because it isn't very common to see someone's full name? It was very much the norm until the 80s-90s, and even today I think the majority of women still go that route. I just spent a couple minutes searching Facebook to sanity check myself, and so far all of the women I'm friends with who are under 30 and married have done it.

I wouldn't use Facebook as a guide. My sisters all have done <First> <Maiden> <Last> for facebook, but none of them have legally changed their middle name. They just do it on facebook so that people can find them.

Most if not ~all of those women are doing it so people can find them on Facebook, and people in the States rarely use the middle name field anyways except for legal docs.

In my experience, the women do that so people that knew their name pre-marriage can find them, not because that is their full name.

That is not super common in the US.

In South-America and other countries it's common for a wife to keep the name she was assigned at birth for ever.

It also is from an era when you would assume that a person's mother was in fact married. Less likely today.

Or for all the women in my family... their maiden name is their current name, because none of them change their name when they get married.

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