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Op-Ed: It's Time To Fix Our Broken Password System

September 17, 2012
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You need one password to login to your computer, another for your smartphone, one for your email, for your bank, your music collection, your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Experts tell us those passwords should be long, contain numbers, letters and symbols and not include personal information like birth dates. Oh, and you're supposed to remember them all, too.

In a piece for The Atlantic, Rachel Swaby argues, "We're required to take downright ridiculous precautions to maintain our online security, and it's not sustainable. In fact, it never was. Our password system is broken, and it's about time we change it."

Swaby joins NPR's Neal Conan on the Opinion Page to talk about her piece, "The Password Fallacy: Why Our Security System if Broken, and How to Fix It."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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