Why am I getting weird security questions with CLEAR?

5/14/2023 1:10:30 AM

If you’re wondering why all the weird questions for addresses you never had, that is a common method used by identity verification services. They choose an obscure question from your history, like past addresses, phone numbers, vehicles owned etc. They give you a list of options, one of which might be true for you, and say "which of these is one you had?" Of course they are all nonsense, except for possibly one.

This is a good thing. This is a clever security check.

The reason to give you all wrong ones and a "none for of the above" button is to make it much harder for an imposter to get lucky, and to accommodate the possibility that they are trying to match you to the wrong record.

The imposter could be an automated script, which gets you into a complicated calculus at making the problem solvable by a legitimate human, but resource-prohibitive for an automated attack to succeed.

5/12/2023 8:28:39 PM

The sort of questions you are seeing are curated from public records (property ownership records, etc.) and credit reports (mortgage/car payments) and probably other proprietary sources as well. If the system can’t find anyone with your same name and birthday, or cannot produce enough questions, then it "gives up" and asks nonsense questions whose correct answer is "none of the above" (used to happen to me). If you have lived in the US for less than say two years, then it’s likely they won’t have any "real" questions. Probably CLEAR knows that the "none of the above" answers don’t actually prove anything, which is why they aren’t letting you in. Unfortunately, I don’t know a way around this other than to wait until you have a bigger "footprint" in the US (e.g. real estate or car ownership, bank accounts, credit cards) so that your set of questions will be "real" questions.

It is unlikely that they incorrectly matched you with a different person with the same name, birthdate, and/or similar fingerprints. For one thing, that would mean the "none of the above" answer would be wrong, and the system would have said that immediately.

As the other answer points out, you may be ineligible for CLEAR due to not being a US Citizen or Permanent Resident. However this almost certainly has nothing to do with your difficulty with the public records questions.

5/12/2023 4:28:59 PM

Officially, CLEAR is only supposed to be available to US citizens and permanent residents:

CLEAR is currently only available to US citizens and legal permanent residents 18 and older with a valid government-issued photo ID.

I imagine the reason for the weird questions is that CLEAR is doing a lookup for a "Thomas Ahle" who is a citizen/resident, finds someone with a similar name, and then tries to verify that you’re that person. I’ve registered for CLEAR before as a permanent resident and the questions were all relevant to my identity.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

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Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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