My name is Victoria Kirst, and I am a software engineer at Google. This is my personal website where you can find my professional information like my resume and a list of my projects. It is also home to my blog, where I document my more frivolous matters.

I have other homes on the internet as well! See me on: LinkedIn, Youtube, Yelp, Pandora, and Amazon. Enjoy your stay!

This will not end well

So I just found out about Amazon PayPhrase today (a couple weeks late, I know). The premise is, you can choose a secret phrase and a secret pin, and if you know these two things then you can shop “securely” without having to enter your credit card.

But they’re SUGGESTING their own randomly generated pay phrases for you? And these randomly generated pay phrases are relatively predictable in nature? And the pin is only 4 digit numbers? And the 4-digit numbers people choose are quite likely going to be easily guessable numbers, like last 4 digits of phone number?

This confuses me. It feels like these “pay phrases” are just username/password, except with longer user names and with 1990s-style super-uniform, super-guessable, super-insecure passwords. Unless there is something going on that I am missing, this makes me make a concerned face ala Tim Gunn.

Also, the suggested payphrases seem to be eerily relevant to your interests:
payphrase_screenshot