I am 54 years old. I keep passwords for so many different activities ... banking, weblogs, e-mail (personal and work), twitter, linkedin, a half a dozen or so work applications, American Express, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, insurance companies, public library, etc, etc, ad nauseum. My greatest concern for myself and all Americans growing up now -
What will happen as we age?
We will forget passwords. Alzheimers will remove us from reality. We are told not to keep lists of passwords. How will we survive in another 20 years when everything is password controlled and our aging population is at the mercy of failing memories?
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4 comments:
For work, just keep them in a random page in a random notebook in your office somewhere. Until businesses are willing to spend money on fingerprint-based system access or smart-card access, screw them, write it down. If you play by their rules, if you forget the password, you'll spend all day trying to go through tech support to get the systems re-enabled. And then you'll have to catch up on your work! Forget that, you've got results to deliver and have no time for silly IT power games. Write those passwords down.
It is ridiculous to have to remember 20 different passwords over the years and what not. Security costs, and business needs to deal with it. It's risk management 101, and if they're too cheap to invest in it, then they ought to accept the risk.
For the home...again, I say write it down. Lock it up in a fire-safe box, put critical stuff in a safety deposit box. Just accept that it won't really be safe. C'est la vie.
Passwords we're designed for mathematicians, I'm sure they could present a proof for it. I say write it down, and then just be careful. After all, if someone steals you're paper records of banking and what not, with an SSN, name an address, there is little that is safe anyways. After all, we all forget passwords.
I think young people today are much less concerned about identity theft than their parents and especially their parents' parents. I am not saying that young people just don't care, but the attitude seems to be that the companies will reimburse you if you are robbed (I don't know how true this is) and that one can't control all of this.
Identity theft should be a concern for anyone as it can lead to ruined credit (so no car or home purchase for you) or bankruptcy (say goodbye to the money in your accounts). Massive debts (by someone using your identity for credit) can likely be avoided, though, if you can prove the theft.
I was more concerned in this post with the issue that I cannot access things I need without a password and what will be the effect some day when, through senility or alzheimer's, I can't remember the passwords. For now, I do as Gaoshancha suggested, but it leaves me vulnerable. If my notebook gets lost, I have no passwords.
Well, I had trouble remembering my password just to comment on this since my password is a remembered one on google. But my solution for password issues is to assign a certain password to different aspects of my life, and recycle it. For instance, when it comes to money, work, and personal stuff that I value greatly, i have one password. And when it comes to websites like google and other simple membership stuff that doesn't affect me personally, I have another. I try to limit myself in this way, but slowly I too am accumulating increasing numbers of passwords.
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