What does ‘sexygoddess@15’ say about you?

You are facing login issues with your net banking and you visit your bank to sort the issue. An IT guy sitting in your bank asks for your password,

Sir, please give me your password so that I can fix your login issues.

With lot of hesitation in your mind and a blush on your face you utter, ‘it’s sexygoddess@15’.

He entered the password, and with a smirk said, ‘oooh! Nice choice Sir’.

You feel utterly embarrassed and try in desperation to justify your choice. Other people surrounding his desk look at you and chuckle. You try to divert the attention of the IT guy and the onlookers by asking some other random question but that completely goes in vain. What just happened? The people who got to know your password drew an inference about your personality. To say the least, they just imagined your sexual fetishes!

Have you ever wondered that in today’s time, when we are laden with the need (or want) to have so many social accounts, what make us choose our passwords? Can a simple password suggest some aspects of our personality? Psychological researches suggest that it can predict a lot about your memorization strategies, visual and finger patterns, affinity towards people or events etc.

Usually when we choose a password we attempt to keep something which can be readily recalled by us when needed. For most of us it is a phrase or a number (or a combination of both) which, consciously or unconsciously, holds deep significance in our lives. Immediately after my grandmother passed away, most of my passwords were changed to ‘iloveunani’. A few weeks later I further changed it to ‘imissyounani’. It also suggests that password creation is a process which evolves with change in time and circumstances. We choose the password that best describes our current situations, belongingness to a particular person or date or event, or our likings and interests. A lady who aims to shed her extra kilos may keep her password as ‘Iamfat’ and once she has achieved her goal may change it to ‘fromfattofit’.

Nowadays when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat are ruling our minds and lives, passwords are a key to the whole social and psychological domain of its user. Password selection is a highly personalized and insightful process. Our brain generates passwords which can be easily memorized and retrieved. To save the effort of learning a new code, the brain chooses an available memory (which is usually semantic in nature) as our password. A Leonardo DiCaprio fan may have his password as “29^th February 2016” which was a historical day in his life. However, a few of us may even design a password on the basis of the patterns of alphabets and numbers on keyboard. Such users rely on their procedural memory, which could be called as digital memory, like qwerty123, or the numbers that fall in a straight line on a phone keypad like 2580, or straight or a diagonal finger pattern.

Passwords are not only the passwords to our social media/bank/or any other type of accounts but they are also a password to our psyche. If your ex’s name or birthday is still your password, then strings with past are still attached. On being confronted, you may even deny this because for you it was just an easy memory but at a subconscious level, those memories are selected which have a high emotional value in your life. If your password is the name, birthday, or any other detail about your spouse, children, parents, friends, pets etc., it can be predicted that you have a strong inclination towards that particular loved one. A man described that he keeps altering his parents’ anniversary and their birthdays as his passwords but has never created any other password apart from these significant dates. Some people’s passwords show significant religious/political orientations as well. A Tibetan friend of mine once told me that all her passwords start with ‘OmManiPadmeHun’ (which holds a great spiritual value in their culture) with a combination of some numerals. A website quotes a crazy Bollywood fan having his password as ‘MogamboKhushHua’. Interesting, isn’t it?

For convenience purposes, earlier most people liked to keep a ‘short, sweet and simple’ password. However, with the accelerating rates of cybercrime, it becomes imperative to choose a complex password which is difficult to crack. The following are some common DOs and DONTs for password selection:

DOs

• ·         Use a combination of names/birthdates/events in both upper and lower case.
• ·         It would be even better if you can use a combination of word/phrase along with numerals and symbols as it becomes more complex to be guessed.
• ·         Keep changing your passwords every month (Lazy people like me can exercise the liberty of same password for a month or two extra!)  
• ·         IF changing your password seems like an intellectually tiresome job, you may probably not change your entire password. You can decide to change just the phrase or just the numeral/symbol.  It is a good idea for people who don’t generally keep a record of their passwords.

DON’Ts

• ·      Don’t use phrases which you keep saying all the time. If some girl keeps telling her friends ‘Main apni favorite hoon’, that is definitely a ‘NO’ for her as a password. You would know exactly what I mean if you have watched Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol starrer Ajnabee (The Bollywood inside me keeps coming out from time to time!)
• ·         Do not share your passwords with people whom you can’t trust with your security and privacy.
• ·     Don’t store the list of your passwords in plain text on your PC. It is advisable to use some password storage software or create a list of websites along with the user name and write a hint for each one which is meaningful just for you.

Reading up this piece of writing would remain incomplete if you don’t try out the following:

DIY: Make a list of your passwords (Don’t forget to delete them or store them in a safe place once you’re done!). Identify the patterns in all the passwords. It will give you an insight into your thought patterns. Watch out for a repetitive object, be it a person, date or an event, in all the passwords. If you happen to identify any pattern which you were previously not aware of, then you have just successfully accessed your subconscious mind!

You must also think whether the object of your password(s) is known to other people in your network. If yes, then be sure to use only the confidential information which is not publically known. Otherwise, it may put your digital security at risk.

So next time, keep all these things in mind before creating your own personalized password. It is an entire whirlpool of emotions at the base of choosing our passwords. Whatever password we may choose, it reflects our thought processes, our inclinations and affinities, and emotional value systems. Therefore, be thoughtful about your passwords.