2020; That’s where we’ll be in just 4 years. It seems pretty distant, but not actually that far into the future. Of course, you see all over social media just how true it is that we are currently living in the future. With the advent of self-driving cars and exoskeletons alike, it’s not hard to believe that we are gaining information and knowledge at an exponential rate.
Now, if you’ve been following this ‘anti-password’ epidemic, you may think that the information on this page will look very similar to other posts about the topic. And you’d be right. We’re not posting this topic to conceive our own new information, we’re posting this to help spread the word that change is inevitable and you should be ready for it!
There’s an interesting article by Smashing Magazine called “Nobody Wants to Use Your Product”. In it, the writer talks about how – at the end of the day – a person doesn’t want to sit in front of a microwave and input a bunch of needless commands. They want their food to be warm. That’s why microwaves exist in the first place, right?! They offer a faster solution than the alternative: heating your food up yourself on the stove. So producers need to focus on simplicity for their products to be successful, not get ‘button-happy’.
Passwords are like microwaves.
At the end of the day, you don’t want to type in a password and remember a hundred different passwords, only to have to worry if they keep your personal information safe from hackers in the first place. No, what you want is to gain access to your things quicker. That’s why passwords are becoming obsolete. They may not disappear for a long time, but in the near future you might start seeing them replaced or accompanied by other means of security.
We’re already seeing finger scans in our personal devices (like iPhones), and facial recognition is not new to Android. They exist because each year, consumers are desperately trying to cut milliseconds off of each task they do. And being able to hack into a device that requires a facial scan is significantly harder to do than have a machine guess people’s passwords.
A massive study was done by Accenture in 2014 (and when we say massive, we mean 24,000 people in 24 different countries), titled Digital Trust in the IoT Era. You can view an infographic from the study here. Of the consumers surveyed, 77% of them stated that they “would be interested in an alternative to usernames and passwords to protect [their] security on the internet”, and 60% of them said that “usernames and passwords are cumbersome to use” (pg 8 of the PDF).
Passwords are/were a great thing, and of course they are/were necessary for establishing a sense of security. There will come a time when they won’t be needed and people will be able to access their information with other means, and that isn’t a bad thing. Consumers crave innovation, freedom, and time. And as the old saying goes; “time is money”.