A Refrigerator Has Never Been Hacked

Today’s WSJ had an ad from the US Postal Service touting the security of a printed document over e-mail and the internet.

Great ad from the USPS reminding companies of the value of the printed letter. (Side note, let’s make sure we send the customer their personal information and not someone else’s.)

Besides the security of the printed letter, mail is a great out-of-band communications with your customer. As we rely more on authenticating users with accounts we don’t control such as Facebook Connect or a Google ID, sending a paper notice is a great safety net. I have seen far too many companies rely upon e-mail to send confirmations that addresses and passwords have changed. If they have your bank username and password, they probably already forwarded your e-mail somewhere else too.

Let’s just make sure we don’t go too far back in time and send new user passwords via USPS.

As originally posted at jayschulman.com on November 8, 2011.