Online Shopping Security: Opinions of an Amateur Psychologist

As I mentioned in last week's Heroes and Villains post, my PayPal account has been hacked twice.  The whole experience has caused me to think a lot about identity theft, and it turns out I'm not a fan.  It's not like I ever thought it was a good thing, but it's existence was largely irrelevant to me except for my Dad's job (he works for a company that tries to prevent it) and the funny commercials that used to be on showing the body builder talking about the cute clothes he bought online in the voice of a high school girl.  Now, however, it's not so funny.


As incredibly annoying as it is to have someone pretend to be me and spend well over a thousand dollars that I don't have, it is even more annoying to have to show photo ID, utility bills, and a contract signing over my first-born child to get my money back.  It's apparently way easier to steal an identity than actually use the one you were born with. Yet even after I jumped through all of the hoops to get the first identity theft issue resolved, it happened again.  As you can imagine, I was outraged!  I'm sure the technologically-minded among us would offer an explanation about malicious hacking software of something, but I don't really care about that.  I'm interested in stopping it. 

I think there should be a system in place that acknowledges identity is more than a password and a handful of meaningless security questions.  I propose this:  that anytime someone makes a purchase online, he or she must take a personality test.  It doesn't have to be a full Myers-Briggs Type Indicator every time, but at least 7 questions which change with every transaction.  As long as the personality type matches the main profile with at least 98% accuracy and a correct password is entered, then the transaction will be approved.  I think this would drastically cut down on the number of fraudulent charges.  And even if someone did manage to hack into my account, at least I could feel like he understands me.