If there’s one thing most people hate about modern technology, it is the number of passwords we have to remember. In our mad dash to tech heaven, we forget the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. It is nothing short of tyranny. Five years ago, people averaged about 21 passwords. Now that number is 81, according to LastPass, a company that makes password-storage software. We are human and dare not lose sight of our individuality, so instead of numbers and ciphers, passwords are typically personalised. Wedding anniversaries, names of pets, children, birth dates, nicknames, lyrics, favourite books and authors.
Some people use the same password for all their access protocols but we are constantly warned that different passwords can protect us from digital crooks. We’re also told that they should be long and they should include numbers and characters, which makes it even more problematic. Who can remember so many complex passwords? In recent years, there has been a push for machines to identify us not by passwords but by things we possess, like tokens and key cards, or by scanning our eyes, voices or fingerprints. Google has bought SlickLogin, a start-up that verifies IDs using sound waves. iPhones come equipped with fingerprint scanners. And yet passwords continue to proliferate, to metastasise. Every day more objects—home wi-fi, car consoles, alarm systems—are designed to be wired into the internet and thus password protected. We are doomed to be forever stuck in the password maze.