Living a passwordless life

The future that will fundamentally change humanity as we know it.

Let’s talk about passwords — yes, yes, the ones that are constantly in the news in recent years, and yes, the same ones we love to hate and always forget.

Thank you Fernando Corbató for giving us the password in the early 1960’s that unfortunately made the entire human race dependent on ever since. Thank you for the password, that has us spending billions of dollars protecting it, spawning an entire new human species called Hackers. These are the people we saw in the movies, read about in the news. They are the boogeyman of every company and government entity regardless of how small or big.

I’m not a software engineer, nor am I a security analyst, nor cyber security guru or anything even close to it. I’m a designer, UX Designer to be precise or just a creative for simplicity sake…

So why am I of all people deciding to talk about passwords?

I’m glad you asked! 😀

My kind of obsession, (well, maybe not obsession but a strong interest) is in human behavior. I like to know how our brain works and why we do things the way we do them. This has led me to an interesting discovery. But before I dive into it all, I just want to mention that I work at a cybersecurity start-up (HYPR) which exposed me to this specific subject through all the usability tests, research and analysis that I have been doing at HYPR for over 3 years.

That certain something that I discovered is passwords, but not just what passwords are. Silly me, I know what passwords are 🤓 — but rather what they mean, how they are perceived and how they make our lives horrible without us even noticing!

I’ll start with a bit of history, passwords as we know them today have been around since the early 1960’s. At first they were basic, quite simple. They did not require much brainpower to come up with one or recall one. We all had a password to unlock/login to something. Mostly these were for hardware, either for a computer, hard-drive or other storage devices that we wanted to be protected from others.

Things started to get complicated as the Internet became something more than just intranet for military bases and…