One in five card holders use birth date as PIN

Remembering passwords may seem the biggest problem you have when managing your e-mail or social network account, but that’s only because you don’t really believe that a compromise of those accounts will be something that happens to you.

And it seems that the same thing goes for card PIN numbers because according to a study conducted by a UK discount code website, 18 percent of the 1,576 participants of the survey admitted to using their birth date as a PIN code for a credit or debit card because they “need a memorable number”.

But what the seem to forget is that their birth date is a piece of information that can easily be retrieved from a social network account if they fail to close it down to the public, or on their driving license or another document they might keep in their wallet. By the by, 13 percent of the interviewed are not strangers to keeping the PIN written down and in their wallet, which is even worse, reports the Telegraph.

And mirroring the bad idea which is having the same password for a number of online accounts, more than half of the participants admitted that they have the same PIN number for multiple cards.

What I got out of all of these results is that common users value their convenience more than their security, and I wonder – is this ever going to change?