I’m so tired of passwords

Getting locked out of my own accounts is a daily occurrence.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

I rarely curse, but when I do my family knows I’m doing taxes or forgot a password. I often use curse words as passwords since they readily come to mind.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: You’re traveling and you need to check your email. Your phone died, so you use another device, a friend’s phone at the airport or maybe the computer at the hotel. When you try to log in, the email says “we’re detecting suspicious activity” meaning the geolocator senses you are not in your home country or using your usual device. It wants to send a text to your non-working phone to give you access to the email your password was supposed to get you access to. You grow frustrated, the minutes tick by while you jump through several hoops because your password doesn’t do what it is meant to.

Why do we endure this?

I am routinely locked out of my own accounts, for my own protection. I feel like hackers have better odds than I do. Microsoft and Google are more likely to ransom my data than any ransomware attack.

Let’s return to first principles. The purpose of the internet is to access information on any connected device from anywhere in the world. Yet it is getting harder to log in from anywhere but your own device in your home or office, and you need…