Flamin' Tesco and its paranoid IT. I haven't gone online to use my Tesco Clubcard a/c for ages but today when I tried, I've entered in my email address and password and then been taken to an additional page that's new to me, but maybe not to others?
The page asks me to key in the 10th, 12th, and 15th digit of my Clubcard number. Ah, well, right. I've all the time in the world to go get my credit card out of my wallet (it also incorporates my Clubcard account) and sift through a parade of numbers.
I thought whichever paranoid halfwit was in charge of Tesco's absurd IT department had long since been put out to grass. Apparently not. We had all this nonsense with its former Tesco Travel Card, where you needed to screw your eyes up to figure out which digit you needed to enter to get into your account. There was so much uproar about that -- ye gods, if online banking can manage with a 4 or 6 digit numeric code, why can't a supermarket chain???? -- that the great Tesco Travel Card went out of existence.
Then we had -- may still have -- the farce of Tesco "security" wanting you to tell it which computers you were using in connection with any savings account. Tesco claimed it was to help "you, the customer". Nothing to do with Tesco harvesting user / locational data, then?
If Tesco had ever been serious about online protection, or shown even a rudimentary awareness of what a keylogger is, it would've introduced virtual keyboards on its websites long since. But Tesco hasn't. Either it doesn't understand anything about IT security or it can't be bothered, most likely the latter.
Every-monumental-16-digit-code-within-which-Tesco-demands-you-find-various-numbers-if-your-eyesight's-up-to-it-helps. Though only an IT department as stunningly inept as Tesco's. Grrrrrr.
* if this is in the wrong place, then I trust the mod to move it to rants or wotever -- a minor IT chore I'd certainly never ask Tesco to undertake.