[gketuma]

Calm down people, it is just an authorization phrase that Verizon uses to make sure you have permission to make changes. You can share that phrase with anyone that you want to make changes to your account. Verizon probably should not call it 'Password'. It is NOT the password that you use to login to their site to pay your bill or anything else. The author is confused on the whole process. The customer service rep as well should have done a better job to explain to him the process as well.

[nickles]

While Verizon does use a separate authorization phrase, I've found that Condé Nast appears to store plain text passwords. I discovered this when a CSR read my password to me over the telephone to confirm it. I reported this issue to Condé Nast but never heard back, so I can only assume this is still the case.

[jeffclark]

True. If you ever want a really good laugh, check out the software and interfaces a magazine fulfillment company uses.

Fulfillment companies are the companies that magazine publishers hire to handle customer service, charge and ship magazines to you at the right time.

Problem is, when it was time to put these magazines online, magazine companies looked to fulfillment companies to handle billing and customer service for them. These fulfillment companies had worked in 30/60 day cycles and were running software that was created in 1985.

So when the Internet came knocking, they just rigged up some stuff to kinda sorta do it the same way.

Before someone writes the obligatory "someone should create some software to make digital fulfillment for old-school publishing better", you should understand that these fulfillment companies own the customer/user data.

To migrate from one fulfillment company to another, you'd have to re-collect billing information for the entire subscription file, which would require the publisher to contact Grandma Barbara and ask hero to send in another check or get on AOL to add her credit card. Which just isn't going to happen.

[demosquared]

I sincerely hope you are right. However, the only thing I understood was that she was asking for my password. I read Hacker News so I know better :) - however, Verizon deals with many others - how are they to figure that out - if that is indeed the case.

[matterhorn]

So the "billing password" is not the password one would use to pay your bill? How very odd. One wonders why she allegedly called it the billing password, then.

[ajross]

Indeed. The phrasing in the chat clearly (really quite clearly) seemed to indicate it was a login password. Even if this is just a throwaway auth token, the way that script is written pretty much guarantees that users will spit their login passwords into the chat. And of course they wouldn't work, and Verizon would then have to have a script to ask for the right info.

I don't buy it. This was asking for a login password.

[rogerbinns]

What they should do is let you login to the website and give a one time use access token (and make it possible to work out the relevant account). Giving that to the rep (phone or email or chat) then makes things a lot quicker and more secure.

For example Netflix does this for support where you get the token from the web page (as a number) and enter it when you make the support call. Google business support has it too although it is valid for longer where the admins can get a token that is entered with support requests.