Séamas O'Reilly: Getting past the password panopticon of the modern Internet

Pic: iStock

Last week I was looking for a half-term camp for my son. 

We had expected to be away for the week but those plans fell through so we were left, abject and scrambling, with just a week to go. 

Luckily, I saw a flyer for one that seemed perfect for our needs. 

A quick search revealed that it had to be booked through an external company but there were certainly a few spaces free.

Unfortunately, in the time it took me to set up an account, input my details, and select a password, all the places had been filled. 

I was therefore without any childcare for the week in question but, at least, I consoled myself, another random email farm will now have my details on file.

When I die, let me be remembered for my foremost function in life; as a ceaseless provider of my personal details to the planet’s starving hordes of apps, websites, and services. 

Perhaps you too have found such a calling.

I don’t wish to paint myself as a young fogey. I am extremely — perhaps recklessly — online, and have been using computers at a competent level since the summer I spent, aged 13, helping my dad connect local area networks in our garage. 

I get the importance of accounts and passwords and security when it comes to private information, it’s just I’m beginning to wonder if I’d sacrifice every milligram of my own privacy if it meant I never had to create another login as long as I live.

Email, social media, and banking services were the first to go this way and — I’ll concede — for good reason. 

It seemed like airlines were next, requiring a sign-in so that your details could be stored forever. 

Then trains needed apps, and leisure centres, councils, and eventually all online publications, shops, delivery services, and even bars and restaurants. 

Then came the serene joys of the additional security measures which have grown up in place around them.

INSTITUTIONAL CAPTCHA

The emergence of Captchas a decade or so ago brought us the joys of having to transcribe weirdly scribbled text because this was the one thing, whatever their powers, that robots were
incapable of. 

These soon gave way themselves to the short-lived and little-missed audio-captcha, and the still-prevalent pictorial grids which demand you click on every image that features whatever object they specify. 

This because, even as Silicon Valley spends trillions in startup cash betting on the fact that artificial intelligence will soon be running our lives, solving all our problems, and perfectly replicating a legally acceptable approximation of Scarlett Johansson’s voice, the digital hive mind has still not mastered the true summit of human intelligence: identifying a bus or a traffic light.

I pay for my daughter’s childcare via a website that requires five-factor verification. Five. 

First, I input my username and password, then I get a text which gives me a code to enter so I can reach a set of three mystery questions which, once answered, will finally allow the payment to be made. 

Sometimes, while doing this, I wonder if such security is really necessary, given that the only function of this service is paying my childcare fees. 

I suppose I would be slightly weirded out if someone hacked into this website and paid them on my behalf, but I wouldn’t exactly be displeased. 

Honestly, any hackers out there, fill your boots.

I’ve long since stopped even choosing new passwords myself, preferring to just let Google automatically suggest a “strong” password that they then memorise for me and which I will never know. 

I suppose this means I’m totally beholden to them to access all those sites but at this point that’s better than the two current alternatives.

The first is memorising hundreds of passwords myself, the thought of which makes me want to put a gun in my mouth. 

This would also surely require me to keep them in a secondary, safe location, thus adding another, further step between me and ordering bin bags from the council. 

So please, for the love of God, if you are reading this online do not hit the comments to recommend me a password manager or I will be forced to sign into Assassn8r, my favourite hitman app, and have you professionally killed.

COCKSURE FLOURISH

The second option is to use the same password, or variations thereof, 200 times. 

This is obviously insane but, going by the number of recent leaks and hacks which have compromised everything from the NHS to American adultery provider Ashley Madison, it also appears to be the most common practice for users of the web. 

I’ll admit I’ve not been above this in the past, sometimes adding a 123 or ! on the end, with the cocksure flourish of a hacker from a mid-’90s cyber-thriller. 

The problem with that, of course, is that whoever decides to hack the app I used once, eight years ago, to rate the quality of dogs in my area, will get the passwords for my banking apps as a free bonus.

Becoming more and more enraged by password-mania as I wrote all of the above, I decided to enact a cull. 

I went to Google’s password manager to survey the full damage. It listed 231 passwords, many for apps and sites I cannot remember ever interacting with. 

Some gave me a sharp dart of nostalgia, defunct podcast providers, food delivery services, and websites I used once and never again, some which have not been commercially available for a decade. 

A dozen are just proprietary apps that I had to sign up for just to order one drink from one bar during covid times. 

Enough, I said, was enough. I clicked on the first of many I would delete, rendered euphoric at the thought of casting off these digital millstones.

A box appeared on screen. “Google Chrome is trying to show your information,” it said, as I felt my heart darken. 

“Please type your Windows password to allow this”.