Category: Security
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A familiar travel-day problem goes like this. You open a website on your phone, it asks for a password you haven’t typed in months, and suddenly you are standing near an airport charging point trying to remember whether you added an exclamation mark or a year to the end of it. Then comes the reset…
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Here’s a painfully ordinary story. Someone uses the same password for Gmail, Netflix, LinkedIn and a shopping site they forgot about years ago. It’s a decent password, by normal human standards. It has a capital letter, a number and one of those exclamation marks websites keep requesting as if punctuation can defeat crime. Then the…
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A developer once told me security was “the infrastructure team’s problem.” He said this while sharing an API key in a Slack channel. Nothing dramatic happened. The message was deleted a few minutes later. But that moment stayed with me because it captures how many people in tech think about security. They treat it as…
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A photo-editing app once asked for access to every photo on my phone. I wanted to remove a shadow from one image. The request felt absurd, but the Allow button was large, the alternative required another screen, and I was in a hurry. That is how many privacy decisions happen. Not after careful thought. Not…
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A photo of a passport lives in an alarming number of people’s phones. It sits in the camera roll between lunch and a screenshot of a boarding pass. Someone needed identification for a hotel, rental, form or account, so taking a photo felt easier than finding a scanner. Digital identity wallets are supposed to make…