Right now there are hundreds of thousands of people cursing themselves for forgetting their password. 20 years ago we never had this problem. It’s a modern day frustration which is one of the down sides of the Internet.
Many of us use several passwords on the web
If you want to do anything meaningful on a website in 2012, chances are you’ll have to create an account. In doing so you’ll have to create a username and password. As creatures of habit we like to use the same ones we’ve used on other sites, but in their wisdom many developers are unhappy with this idea of conformity and instead like to impose different rules to the rest. Some websites will only allow passwords with more than 6 characters, some more than 8, some force you to enter a numeric character, and others like to enforce the use of commas, apostrophe’s, and full stops in the password. My biggest bugbear is with sites that force you to use a password you’ve never used before.
All these password rules for different websites mean we have a whole string of different passwords for different websites. When we need to access a site we haven’t used for a while it can be an extremely painful process. Often by the time I gain access I’ve forgotten why I went there in the first place, but this could just be an age thing.
Of course online security is important, but us humans only have a limited capacity to remember all these passwords. I know quite a few people who’ve taken the unfortunately ironic step to write down all their passwords on a pad next to their computer.
Google has a simple idea to help us remember
Anyway, I digress. Rather than rant about remembering passwords I wanted to highlight a really nice idea I saw on Google today. In one of my more security conscious moments I decided to change passwords to a more secure one for some of the sites I rely on for business services. So earlier today I tried to access Google with my usual password and Google had remembered that it was an old password and reminded me I’d changed it. I thought this was such a nice simple solution that all sites should do the same.
What do you think? Have you any other nice examples of password recovery on the web?
