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Comment by enobrev | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you and for accounts that matter (bank, etc), I'll generally generate additional passwords with my PW manager for each question and store them there.

That said, I have a peeve with one of the standard questions they ask, which is the "favorite" question. Favorite movie, favorite band, favorite song, etc. Besides the fact that I don't have One Favorite anything, does anyone actually have life-long singular favorite things? How the hell should I know what my favorite movie was 3 years ago when I rushed through some account creation process on some random website?

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> I'll generally generate additional passwords with my PW manager for each question and store them there.

You have to be a bit careful with that, since some banks like to use those answers as "second factors"* when you call them. So I've gotten in the habit of using diceware-style passphrases for those, as those work over the phone better than pure white noise passwords.

*extreme air quotes

I also generate additional passwords, but after reading my additional password over the phone to an agent that pretty clearly would have accepted (it's giberish), I've since started storing what I deem to be a reasonable answer to the question. A random movie for the 'favorite movie' question, random name for best friend, etc.

That's probably the best solution. It would be nice to have a dictionary of answers to these sorts of things (a dictionary of names, a dictionary of cities, etc) to quickly generate these in a truly random way to try and eke a little bit more entropy out of it.

That's a good point, and a great reason to try the "make pronounceable" option on my password generator.

KeePassXC comes with a Password Generator button in the toolbar and has a Passphrase option. Just max out the word count and choose your new favourite for each account.

They stop making new movies when you answer that question, thus ensuring your answer will remain valid.

That still doesn't stop you stumbling across an older film that you've never watched before, and then finding that you like it more than your "favourite".

Wait, you answer the question before having seen every single movie? How irresponsible.

I tried my best but the session timed out before I had even finished one movie.

Simple - we'll destroy every film in existence after you've asked that question. You get to be "the movie guy". That guy over there is "the book guy". The one in the corner who everybody hates? He's the one who had to use his first girlfriend's name...

The ones I love are those with questions like "What was the first city you visited" and they give you a multiple choice of like ten cities, none of which you may ever actually have visited.

Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA lifelong favorite song. (although I must say that the Eye of the Tiger comes very very close)

Now we know your age, too!

And a pretty strong hint to "his" gender...

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