Good morning: Passwords cause friction
Security is a good thing, but some leading brands are looking for alternatives to traditional passwords.
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Good morning, Marketers, it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
There’s good reason digital marketers hate friction. Each hurdle increases the likelihood of a customer bailing out on a transaction. This is the first part of a marketing conundrum. Because marketers love security. They want customers to know their data is safe from prying hackers. The problem is security causes friction.
Account passwords are a big source of this. Even when they aren’t lost or forgotten, they are still a disliked extra step. The Fast Identity Online Alliance (FIDO) says they have a solution. It is a way to let users log into online accounts the same way they do to smartphones and computers – using their faces, fingerprints and PIN codes. Is victory at hand? Maybe. Facial recognition on most devices is easily spoofed, for one. However, the FIDO pack includes a lot of very smart companies who have been working on this for a while.
It’s too soon to declare the end of the password, but there’s a distinct possibility of smoother sailing ahead.
Constantine von Hoffman,
Managing Editor
Shorts (Optional)
“It is very difficult to explain the choice of the letter Z and its use in a mobilization and PR campaign. … The ‘Z-campaign’ looks strange and ill-conceived when Russian politicians claim they are fighting for the protection of the ‘Russian world.’ It turns out that the Russian world is protected under a Western letter. Worse still, the Z inconveniently is also at the beginning of the name of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Even Kremlin political technologists criticize the new ultra-patriotic brand … for its ideological senselessness.” – Andrey Pertsev on the Russian government’s pro-war PR campaign, which is built around a graphic of the letter Z
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