Drowning in Passwords

The proliferation of technology has greatly improved our ability to network and perform tasks that would have been nearly impossible only a decade ago. However, no good deed goes unpunished. To gain access to this new technology we must create accounts … and accounts have usernames and passwords. Before long you have a plethora of these usernames and passwords to remember. It seems the more technologically savvy you are, the more passwords you must remember.

Over the last month, the number of passwords I need to remember has exceeded my brain’s capacity for holding this type of information. I wanted to find out exactly how many passwords were floating around in my brain so I wrote down all the web sites I need to log into. The total came to 51.

I suppose passwords have become what phone numbers used to be. 15 years ago you’d memorize the phone numbers of often-called family and friends – maybe not 51, but probably a reasonably large number. These days we program numbers into our cell phones so there’s no reason to remember them. In fact, I only know two phone numbers from memory – mine and my parents (and the latter only because I learned it in the days before cell phone proliferation). I can’t even remember my wife’s phone number – likely because all the “access code/number” slots in my head are filled with passwords. 

According to a Microsoft research paper “The average user has 6.5 passwords, each of which is shared across 3.9 different sites. Each user has about 25 accounts that require passwords, and types an average of 8 passwords per day.” My numbers are significantly larger. How many passwords do you have?

Being curious I decided to categorize all my passwords to see where I was using them. No surprise that “Work” (including anything work-related) was tied for the #1 position. “Web2.0” (which includes sites like last.fm, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) was the other “top performer.” Because I don’t like to write passwords down, I need to keep them all fresh in my head. It certainly isn’t easy. As we become more and more interconnected with the web I fear this number is only going to rise. However, at some point it will become ridiculous (actually, I think it has already reached that point) and there will be a clear market demand for an easier system. Until then I’ll just log out of my blog – hopefully I’ll remember the password when I write my next post.

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