Sunday, July 19, 2009

Of Passwords and passcodes and pin numbers and ids and ....

Of all the passwords and pin numbers and pass codes and key numbers that one has to remember today, I feel technology has somewhere not been able to help here beyond a point.

Take me as an example, an average professional with couple of bank accounts (mostly legacy). I have a credit card that needs a pin, then there is the telephone pin, there is also a user id and a password for online access and there is a transaction password for the transactions too. Before I integrated the credit card and the back account, all these were repeated for the debit card too!!!

Now just multiply these with the no of bank accounts and credit cards and debit cards you carry, one can choose a common password, but one can never get to keep the characters same since there is no standardization (perhaps there should not be one, for security reasons!) on what characters are acceptable under each institutions security policies. Then there are some who have permanent passwords, for some you need to change them every 2 weeks (my trading portal for instance).

My office secure id card needs a pass code and each of my email accounts needs one (to my horror someone had even broken into one such personal email a friend had created for us few years back!). The fall out of that was that I stopped having all those email accounts, I just have one official email and then there is one to send personal mails to people, that I access once in a month or two.

I do not remember the passwords to my bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, emails, secure cards any more. I am not sure how this is going to change my life in the future.

 

But I personally feel it’s time for technology to move on and create a more universal yet secure identification for all of us!