The multiple passwords that we use in our digital lives unlock more than just our email clients and favorite websites — the unlock stories about our past, present, and future. For years, journalist Ian Urbina has been asking his friends and family and even total strangers to tell him their passwords, and he recently wrote about that in the New York Times. He’s not interested in identity theft, but he is interested in their identities. In this interview with Anne Strainchamps, he says that passwords often have incredibly rich backstories. He tells her, "In an eight character code, you can hear and half-an-hour to an hour worth of emotion and story and history."
Urbina calls the personal passwords “keepsakes passwords,” which he says conveys two meanings. The first is that in “keeping” the password you “harbor” it, keeping it close to you over time. But secondly, it also conveys what he calls the “tchotchke” element of these objects. “In and of themselves, they are meaningless,” he says, “But you imbue them with meaning because it’s got this special, personal story behind it.”
Over the course of his research, Urbina even learned new things about his immediate family, including his wife. In her passwords, she often used a series of digits which — unbeknownst to him — were the street address for her father’s boyhood home. She kept those digits in her password because her father had a severe stutter growing up. According to Urbina, “In order to say his home address, he had to sing it…and for her, [those digits] recalled her father’s strength and his weakness all in one.”
Urbina speculates that one of the reasons that people were so eager to discuss their passwords and their stories is to “thumb their nose” at the stress-inducing aspects of a good “citizen” on the web. According to Urbina, people have a “pent-up frustration with the tidal wave of information we have to swim through every day and things we have to remember.” Sometimes the most cathartic thing you can do in that situation is tell someone something you’re not supposed to: your password.