I currently have approximately four thousand and fifty-three passwords, and apparently none of them is correct.
Every website insists that I create a unique password containing at least twelve characters, one capital letter, one number, one symbol and what appears to be the blood of a medieval prince.
I create it. I carefully save it. I return three days later.
“Incorrect password.”
Well, one of us is lying.
I remember a time when I had one password. It probably contained the dog’s name and the year I was born, and it worked perfectly well for everything. Nobody demanded punctuation. Nobody insisted I change it every six weeks. Nobody warned me that the password I had just invented had appeared in a data breach somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Now, every part of modern life requires its own elaborate security arrangement. Banking, shopping, streaming television, paying bills, making medical appointments and ordering a pizza all require separate accounts. I cannot buy a pair of socks without first creating a profile, verifying my email address and proving I’m not a robot.
Frankly, a robot would have given up by now.
Passwords must never be reused, which is reasonable advice if you are the sort of person capable of remembering 146 unrelated combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation. I am not. I can walk into a room and forget why I went there. The chances of me remembering whether my electricity account ends in an exclamation mark or an ampersand are extremely poor.
The websites aren’t helping.
“Your password must include a special character.”
I add one.
“Your password cannot include that special character.”
I try another.
“Your new password cannot be similar to a previous password.”
Of course it’s similar. I created both of them. There is a limit to how many original works I can produce simply to check my gas bill.
Eventually, I invent something so complicated that no hacker could possibly guess it. Unfortunately, neither can I.
That is when the password reset process begins.
First, I must enter my email address. Then the website announces that it has sent me a verification code. I leave the page to check my email, copy the code and return, only to discover that the page has refreshed and forgotten the entire conversation.
We begin again.
Sometimes the code arrives instantly. Sometimes it arrives twenty minutes later, long after it has expired. Sometimes four codes arrive together and I have to determine which one remains valid through a process normally associated with bomb disposal.
Then there are security questions.
“What was the name of your first pet?”
That should be easy, except I can’t remember whether I entered the dog’s actual name, a nickname or something deliberately false because a security expert once warned me that strangers might know too much about my childhood.
“What was the model of your first car?”
I remember the car. What I don’t remember is whether I typed Honda, Honda Prelude or “unreliable red death trap.”
None of these systems seem designed to keep criminals out. They seem designed to keep me out.
Even when I know the password, technology remains suspicious. My phone looks directly at my face and decides it has never seen me before. Apparently, facial recognition is perfectly capable of identifying international criminals in a crowded airport but becomes confused if I change my glasses.
My computer then asks whether I would like it to remember the password. Yes. Absolutely. That is the entire reason I own a computer. I would like it to remember everything I no longer can.
So I click “save.”
The next time I visit, it remembers nothing.
Occasionally, it produces three different passwords for the same account, none of which work. I don’t know where they came from. Perhaps my computer has started creating passwords recreationally.
And we’re told to use password managers, which store all our passwords behind one master password. This is a wonderful solution, provided we can remember the master password. If we forget that, we haven’t merely misplaced one key; we’ve locked ourselves out of the entire building.
I understand that security matters. I don’t want criminals accessing my bank account, stealing my information or ordering twelve televisions in my name. But there must be a point at which protecting my identity stops requiring me to prove it seventeen times a day.
Every morning, another device wants a password. Another company sends a code. Another website asks me to select every square containing a traffic light. I select them carefully, only to be presented with bicycles, bridges and blurry objects that may or may not be buses.
Apparently, I’m not qualified to confirm that I’m human.
At this point, I’m no longer worried about hackers stealing my identity.
They’re welcome to it.
Perhaps they can work out the password.
