Codes of conduct

Our life is increasingly becoming complicated as it becomes more and more digital. What's the way out?

Twenty years ago, none of us had passwords. Today, we need multitudes of them to conduct our lives – be it entering the office, paying utility bills, buying things online or communicating with others. Worse, some systems specify a certain minimum length of password, or they force us to have a combination of letters, signs and numbers. How are we supposed to remember so many complex codes, especially when we need to change them all the time?

No wonder many of us tend to use the same code for multiple accounts, or choose ones that are easy to remember, which can mean that they are easy to guess. This explains why the sequences “123456” and “qwerty” were among the most common passwords last year, leaving a large number of users at risk of having their privacy compromised.

We’re told that the solution is to choose passwords that are hard to guess, but that also means that they are difficult to remember. And if we write our passwords down, that just makes it easy for would-be hackers.

Could it be that forcing us to make our passwords more complicated simply makes humans behave like computers? Isn’t the opposite supposed to happen? Making our “smart” devices think more like us.