You'd Be a Lot Safer Online if Everyone Knew Your Passwords

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I know that if not for passwords all my devices would pimp themselves out and go full power bottom on anyone who knows how to turn them on, so it sounds reasonable to teach our gadgets the power of monogamy by protecting them behind one—but judging by the fact that I have so many of them I'm starting to get them mixed up with my BDSM safewords and that there's a real possibility my smart washing machine is gonna ask me to sign up with my best email next time I try to centrifugate my lime green mankini, I'd say this is getting out of hand.

In comes, the idiotic shortcuts people take to deal with passwords.

As the saying goes: gold is tried in fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of having to memorize more credentials than what the janitor at Area 51 needs to go mop the alien's restroom. And if you think common sense would stop people from making "123456" the last line of defence for their online presence, you are—vastly—underestimating a human brain's capacity to keep a steady heartbeat whilst making the most fat-headed dumbass decisions ever put to labour.

Hard to argue with this: Some go the extra inch and skip "qwerty1" to use the name of their pets but unless your chihuahua is called Ms Heliotrope rest assured a thousand other Standard Netflix subscriptions are rocking the exact same string of ASCII characters yours is.

In fact, 81% of all data breaches are due to shitty passwords.

People using the same braindead passwords is so astonishingly common that aspiring hackers don’t need to frequent shady Discord servers or do an internship at Anonymous HQ anymore. They just need to brute force into an account by running a list of the greatest password hits and they’ll get more matches than a 6-foot-tall metrosexual on Tinder during Valentine's season.

Jump to this conclusion: some would believe password rules manage to nudge people's lazy-ass efforts into something remotely secure—that is until you realise that the instantly-hackable "p@s5woRd" has 8 characters, a capital letter, a number, and a symbol.

Even the biggest tech corporations mess this up.

Facebook and Google used to store users' passwords in plain text files, and given the number of subreddits dedicated to leaking celebrity nudes I'd wager iCloud offers the privacy and protection of see-through lingerie. In turn, breached companies have to pay for unplanned downtime, higher customer turnover and a tarnished reputation that will lose them business like Amber Heard wrote an op-ed about them—total cost: $4.2 million a year, which is more than peanuts.

But worry not, for these companies plan to solve passwords by making them public.

Say goodbye to keeping your mother's maiden name a secret because Apple, Google, and Microsoft assembled their own Avengers team (the Fast Identity Online Alliance—I know, not as catchy a name) to design a passwordless future. Or rather, a future where everyone knows what your "password" is, but only you can use it—you've tried some of these already: entering a PIN in your phone, scanning your fingerprint, inspecting your retina, and who knows maybe farting into a mic once the tech is perfected. Whatever biometrics we end up going for, anything's better than spotting traffic lights on a CAPTCHA test, so sign me up.

Getting rid of passwords altogether will be a challenge though.

This giant leap for mankind cannot be taken without first extinguishing the tinfoil-hat folks who still carry a Nokia 3310 and make family dinners uncomfortable with their Big Brother conspiracies. In other words, for this passwordless future to work, we need the latest tech and the willingness to emancipate from the flawed-yet-familiar sight of passwords. I bet a bell would do the trick; if one could make Pavlov's dogs salivate then it can also make a flat-earther buy a Huawei.

Unsolicited advice: in the meantime, remember that when it comes to passwords, size matters, so if you want to keep your dick pics safe, here are some tips for creating better ones.

So, technically...

You'd be a lot safer online if everyone knew your passwords. You won't need to keep them secret because they'd be your fingerprint, your face, a PIN sent to your smartphone... classic passwords can be forgotten, leaked in data breaches or abused by vengeful ex-couples but no one's stealing your biometrics without risking a conviction for kidnapping and torture so there you go—now you can focus on forgetting where the fuck did you leave the car keys.