Password be gone?
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

Item

A perpetual hot topic is data security – whether it be your company financials, your client’s billings, your patron’s records or your own personal health or bank records. Passwords are one of many solutions and many of us have so many that it makes life more confusing by the day. This week, personal-technology columnist, David Pogue, writes in Scientific American about the ways in which some companies are keeping data, theirs and yours, safe by thinking more rationally and possibly more simply about the transactions.

Omni Hotels, as one example, if you’re lucky enough to have booked through the Select Guest Loyalty program, lets you walk in, tell them your name and be handed a key. Done! No questions, no IDs to review. Their logic is that you’re the one who knows your own name, knows what you booked and their rationale is that it’s unlikely that some imposter will know all of this AND try to sleep in your bed!

Some might call that lax security, but other businesses are using the same rationale. Pogue cites buying a program from Apple’s online Mac App Store. The program is downloaded and installed automatically and you’re not even prompted for a password or security question. The key here in both situations seems to be that the vendor “controls both ends of the transaction”. 

Another article on security and data protection discusses the lengths that music and movie publishers go to in order to protect their material while users are happily downloading pirated copies from other places. It’s not all about saving money, people don’t want the inconvenience. This particular article also cites a small personal test the author conducted regarding his online PDF publication versus the traditional book you buy in the store! The results were unexpected and interesting.  For all of us who provide, use, share, market or sell information, it’s an intriguing idea.

One last thought about the absurdity of some security processes. Pogue tells the story of his elementary school child having to remember a password that is “at least 8 characters long, must contain letters, numbers and punctuation, and may not include any recognisable English word” just to download homework assignments from a website. Many kids can’t remember to do up their shoes, so this seems destined for failure. Maybe they should take a page out of Apple and Omni’s book. Just don’t make that page too hard to read! It’ll be too inconvenient and no-one will remember the password.

« Blog