Digital Culture Studies

In September, I am working with a colleague to do some training regarding resonsibly managing one’s digital presence, and it has me thinking about the practical aspects of this.

How do other people manage their business online?

As a former tech worker, I can tell you that the most boring part of my job was being called to help the office staff when they had lost their new computer log ins and passwords. We were all required to change all of our passwords weekly, a security measure against …. nothing, as it turned out. When companies force employees to change their passwords so often, employees get frustrated, and security goes down, because one of two things happen - either they recycle the same two or three passwords, or, most likely, they write down their new passwords on Post-It notes, and stick those notes under their keyboard or their mousepad.

75% of the time, my awesome password recovery skills involved me flipping over the mousepad.

This was generally on computers that more than one person worked on, or that were not assigned to specific people. The other 25% of the time can be broken into three categories: stuff on your desk, the name of something you love, or an expletive. These are the most likely words to be used as computer log ins. I have often thought that if I managed a large corporation, I would use as a barometer of my management skills the number of people who use an expletive and my name together as one of their passwords. You would be surprised how many people do this, despite keystroke logging programs and other security measures.

 It wasn’t my job to help people recover their passwords, but there were negative repercussions for having to get your computer reset by a sysadmin too often, and as it turns out, I am extraordinarily good at figuring out where people stick their post it note with their new password. At the time, it used to frustrate me, to see people write down their username and password, but now? Now I understand it.

How does anyone manage to remember all of their usernames and logins for everything they do on every computer? When I started to count it all up, I have something like 20 different email addreses, 3 different computers that I log into, and all sorts of ridiculous things that I access that require username/password. And owing to my early security training, none of my passwords are people, places, or things. :) But how do you remember random mixes of upper and lowercase letters and numbers?

It is enough of a problem that I am considering adding a fingerprint scanner to my desktop system. But….and this is a huge but….to get it to work, you install software that must save of all your usernames/passwords. Isn’t that eminently hackable?

How do you organize the business of your digital life? I don’t have a good answer, and I need one.

Posted Hardware, Lifehacks, Thinking Out Loud |