Next time you go to a bar, bring your Kindle, and leave it at the table, when you leave. If you do not have the device password protected, someone may pick it up and buy books for thousands of euros without any control at all. Amazon will not be checking any password at the purchase. You can easily deactivate the Kindle remotely, once you discover the theft. From then on, the thief will not be able to read the books any more. However, you will still have paid for them.
Now you are more careful, so you password protect the Kindle. You read a great book on it, and you lend the Kindle with its password to your teenage son. When you get it back, it has one gigabyte of books about motorcycle maintenance on it. And your bank account is in the red.
At a coffee break at work, write a raving review about that great book you bought for the Kindle. To be able to write the review, you need to log in to Amazon. A colleague calls you next door to show pictures of his baby, and you do not lock your computer. A passerby sits down at your computer and uses your Amazon account to buy a 10 000 euro lens to his camera. And a 6000 euro camera to his brand new lens. (I have not tried this, but there seems to be no password request here either.) For good measure, he buys a couple of more ebooks and downloads a bunch of mp3 files using your account as well.
Why can't they ask for a password at each purchase?
And now Google have their music download service Google Play. Before you go home from work, you quickly open a browser window at your work PC to write a quick thank-you mail to your dentist. Another colleague calls you next door to look at pictures he has taken of his cat. The dishonest passerby comes back, and using the same browser as you used for the mail, he opens Google Play, where he can buy and download mp3 files all night using your account. (Your colleague really has a lot of cat pictures.)
Why can't they ask for a password at each purchase?
To "increase" the security, it seems all those online mail providers have decided to get to know everything about our lives. Never before have so many people known my mother's maiden name or the name of my first pet. We are supposed to choose passwords that are so strong that we are bound to forget them, and then all mom's childhood friends can easily access all my personal data.
What is really bad, is that security questions often are mandatory. How many of us do not have a list where we list not only our many passwords, but also all the different maiden names we give to different online companies: "Mom's maiden name with Yahoo: Smith. Mom's maiden name with Google: Leclerc. Mom's maiden name with Apple: Pope Pious XIVXC..."
My secret dream is that all security questions and passwords one day will be replaced by a simple request for a promise. "Yes, I am above 18 years old, and I am really Magnus, cross my heart. Please, let me read my mail - and nothing else."
Now you are more careful, so you password protect the Kindle. You read a great book on it, and you lend the Kindle with its password to your teenage son. When you get it back, it has one gigabyte of books about motorcycle maintenance on it. And your bank account is in the red.
At a coffee break at work, write a raving review about that great book you bought for the Kindle. To be able to write the review, you need to log in to Amazon. A colleague calls you next door to show pictures of his baby, and you do not lock your computer. A passerby sits down at your computer and uses your Amazon account to buy a 10 000 euro lens to his camera. And a 6000 euro camera to his brand new lens. (I have not tried this, but there seems to be no password request here either.) For good measure, he buys a couple of more ebooks and downloads a bunch of mp3 files using your account as well.
Why can't they ask for a password at each purchase?
And now Google have their music download service Google Play. Before you go home from work, you quickly open a browser window at your work PC to write a quick thank-you mail to your dentist. Another colleague calls you next door to look at pictures he has taken of his cat. The dishonest passerby comes back, and using the same browser as you used for the mail, he opens Google Play, where he can buy and download mp3 files all night using your account. (Your colleague really has a lot of cat pictures.)
Why can't they ask for a password at each purchase?
To "increase" the security, it seems all those online mail providers have decided to get to know everything about our lives. Never before have so many people known my mother's maiden name or the name of my first pet. We are supposed to choose passwords that are so strong that we are bound to forget them, and then all mom's childhood friends can easily access all my personal data.
What is really bad, is that security questions often are mandatory. How many of us do not have a list where we list not only our many passwords, but also all the different maiden names we give to different online companies: "Mom's maiden name with Yahoo: Smith. Mom's maiden name with Google: Leclerc. Mom's maiden name with Apple: Pope Pious XIVXC..."
My secret dream is that all security questions and passwords one day will be replaced by a simple request for a promise. "Yes, I am above 18 years old, and I am really Magnus, cross my heart. Please, let me read my mail - and nothing else."
Impenetrable security grid
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