My mum wants to borrow my cousin's car seat for driving her nephew around in the lead up to the wedding. She asked me to pick it up from my cousin's house, however, my cousin wasn't going to be home that day, and told my mum that she had left the car seat at the front of their house. I've never been there before, but it was only about 10 minutes away from my house, so it was an easy drive.
As I was walking up the driveway to my cousin's house, I noticed a few of the neighbours standing on the footpath looking my way. Since I had never been there before, I figured they were wondering who I was (sidenote: I've kinda wanted to live in a Desperate Housewives style neighbourhood for a while now, but it's probably nothing like they make it seem in the TV show). I grabbed the car seat from the porch, and as I started walking back to where I had parked my car, I was wondering if any of them thought I might be an opportunistic thief who saw the car seat there and decided to take it.
What would I do if one of them had challenged me to prove I was related to my cousin? I didn't have my cousin's phone number, so that wasn't a solution. I thought maybe I could just say a bunch of things that only someone who knew my cousin would know, e.g. her date of birth, the names of her kids, her maiden name, etc.
However, it occurred to me that maybe they were also being opportunistic identity thieves. How did I know they were actually neighbours and not just people who happened to be standing there at that time?
In this case, we have a problem of establishing mutual trust. I wasn't just going to spout out random information about my cousin without them proving that they were neighbours of her somehow. They weren't going to trust me to just take the car seat without proving that I was related to my cousin somehow. Was there another method we could use to establish some sort of trust?
As a neighbour, I did not expect them to know the same kind of details that I would know, like her hobbies when she was a child, or where her parents live. Similarly, as a cousin who doesn't visit, I wouldn't expect myself to know the same kind of things they would know, like where their kids go to school, or even what colour their car is. The kind of stuff we would probably share, kids' names, birthday are also common things that come up when you are asked to prove your identity (as lame as it sounds, a lot of parents in the office see to have their kids' names as their phone passwords (I hope it's not phone banking) - which is terrible as it's not something that's very hard to learn).
In the short 20 second walk to my car, I couldn't think of any solution other than to log in to Facebook on my phone and show that I'm friends with my cousin and that we have exchanged messages before. Wouldn't entirely help if they didn't even know who lived in that house, but I think at that point, it's a double bluff.
Assuming I did not know my cousin and just pulled up a random profile, if they were legit neighbours, I'd get called out. If they were fake neighbours, they'd just have to play along, as they want to keep up the ruse of being friendly neighbours.
Assuming I did know my cousin, and pulled up her profile, legit neighbours would recognise it, and fake neighbours would have to play along.
So, three out of four cases are in my favour.
I don't know of a good solution - does anyone else have a suggestion?
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