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Thursday Nov 09, 2006
Password to life
Facts of modern life: taxes, death and... passwords. How many are you expected to remember? Bank access, online accounts, email and much more; nowadays the universally accepted format for giving remote access to your personal information is via a pre-registered password.
It's like some new weird law of the internet that as the more areas of our lives go online, the more passwords we have to remember. It's almost like the price we pay for entering the matrix where information becomes personalised. As if to confirm this, the whole password phenomenon has become the subject of an increasing body of research.
Up to now there aren't that many remedies offered to dealing with 'authentication anger': saving passwords on your computer, getting your long forgotten password emailed to you or my personal favourite, just using the same password for everything (although this of course should never be advised). One authenticationally challenged friend who employed this method, topped it off by making that master password their own name- the canny double bluff solution to the modern blight of "forgotten password syndrome".
Behind all this is the double-edged nature of the impersonal side to the internet. In many situations, we take advantage of the impersonal potential of the internet: joining in discussions anonymously, indulging our curiosity for the risqué or even, sadly, ending a relationship. In others, the impersonal side counts against us: proving we are who we are to a computer system, losing money fraudulently or even having our identity phished and 'stolen'.
But does the internet really have to be like this? For many websites, logging in is arguably much more valuable to the entity behind the website than it ever is to the user. Harvesting personal information for marketing and other commercial purposes is a rapidly growing business. For example, no registration is required to submit a question on YouthNet's askTheSite service- even though this could undoubtedly offer us tantalising information about our users. There is a lot to be said for respecting internet users' confidentiality in this way.
With our online identity growing increasingly, how providers of web services protect their users' confidentiality is only going to become more of an issue. Personally, I'd also add/plead for less automated authentication- burying ourselves in passwords is rapidly losing its viability as an option.
If I get asked what my imaginary pet's name is again I'll probably explode :-)
Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 12:10 PM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by Beth Kanter on November 10, 2006 at 03:10 AM GMT+00:00 #