Ruberg’s historical analysis of the origins of security questions, particularly the ubiquitous mother’s maiden name one, was definitely eye-opening for me. It’s fit well within our readings and discussions over the past couple weeks about default settings and finite options when filling out forms, and how tech has for decades catered to normative personas without pushing themselves to consider lives and perspectives that exist outside those norms. Reading this, I realized how that question has never posed any dissonance for me specifically, and I’ve had to answer it so many times over the course of my life. Seeing the list of assumptions that question makes, it became clear exactly how privileged of a position I have come from to have been raised by a heterosexual married couple which followed the traditional patriarchal role of the woman taking the man’s last name. It just made me curious to hear the stories of the many people who are faced with that question just as often as I have been, but have had to debate the best course of action. How do those people proceed based on their own situation and how have they developed an answer to that question that does not raise eyebrows to those on the other end? Â