How often have you surfed to a Web site, only to puzzle over which password you used when you last entered it? A new breed of automated log-in services may help.
The latest must-have application for many users is a free automated log-in utility that gives access to Internet accounts without the perplexing need to remember a user name or password.
The trends to personalize technology and maintain customer profiles are fueling the growth of log-in services. Without passwords, many e-commerce sites won’t recognize customers, news sites won’t give access to their archives and Web-based e-mail services won’t grant access to messages.
More than half of all calls to help desks arise from forgotten passwords, clearly illustrating that the common user name/password combination taxes the human memory. But staffing help desks is costly for site owners; for users, the costs are borne in wasted time.
Free automatic log-in services such as Passcenter (www.passcenter.com), Ecode (www.ecode.com) and Obongo (www.obongo.com) store personalized lists of favorite Web addresses, together with any password information, much like a virtual bookmark directory. All the user has to do is navigate to the service and choose the destination from there–the site handles the log-in process.
Passcenter.com offers the most innovative log-in and is the only service to banish passwords from the user experience. While other sites require users to set up yet another password for authentication, Passcenter works by asking users to recognize five faces. Tests show that users can recognize the correct face far more easily than they can recall passwords.
It may be that Passcenter has hit upon the ultimate user secret. Security experts agree that the perfect way to verify users is to ask them something only they can know. Birth dates and children’s names are too easy to guess, and anything more complicated gets harder to remember, especially if you use variants. But five uniquely assigned faces can’t be written down, lost or described to anyone. They can’t be guessed, and you will always remember them, experts say.
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“I surf from home and work, and I need one central place where I can get to all my passwords from any machine,” says Rand Williams, a systems software engineer living in Dallas. “If I want to view my stock portfolio, make a bank transfer, check my Hotmail account or search a news archive, I can do it by using Passcenter regardless of whether I’m sitting at the right desk.”
Services such as Ecode and Obongo offer a form of automated log-in that functions well if you limit your surfing to just one machine. They work by downloading an additional browser bar, which, apart from the inconvenience of installation, intrudes somewhat into the desktop viewing area.
Once downloaded, the bar works reasonably well, offering a directory of key sites and places to store your basic personal information. But a major irritation with using such a bar is immediately apparent every time you open a new window–having to wait while the bar is installed and updated to reappear inside your browser.