Life, but nothing like it.

Bad habits breed bad habits.

The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty quickly. Furthermore, most parents reasonably believe that young children should be supervised online. As tweens turn into teens, the narrative shifts. Some parents continue to require passwords be forked over, using explanations like “because I’m your mother.” But many parents use the language of “trust” to explain why teens should share their passwords with them.

danah boyd | apophenia » How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing.

My Inner INFOSEC Analyst shudders.

I started using the internet in, oh, probably around circa ’95/’96, when I was 13ish. I never gave passwords to my parents and they never asked. Actually, I was explicitly told never, ever to share them with anybody ever, on pain of Serious Parental Disapproval. If I lost them, it was my bad and I had to deal with the consequences.

Sharing a password the is a show of trust, but it’s a show of trust on par with Big Adult shows of trust like sharing finances and powers of attorney. It should never be coerced, especially between family members. A password allows whomever you’ve shared it with access to some very private aspects of your life — probably more than you realise, since I assume you use the same password for more than one service — and the ability to emulate you, nearly perfectly. You’d better trust whomever you’ve given it to not only not to hurt you now, but to never ever hurt you in the future.

Passwords also say something about you. If I know one of your passwords, I can probably guess the format the others will take; the sorts of words you’ll base them on, how and where you’re likely to pad them out to meet minimum complexity requirements. Are you a 12345678 person or a favourite movie person?

Passwords, in other words, are SRS BUSINESS.

I do like the piggy bank escrow idea, although I think there’s also merit in letting teens simply forget and recover their own passwords like adults. Little kids, maybe not so much, but I’d tend towards the opinion that a “password handover” should be part of growing up. “You’re old enough to manage your own passwords now, kid. From now on, I don’t want to know them.”

The flip side, of course, is that not knowing someone else’s password has merits too.

There really is something to be said for plausible deniability.

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Christ mouse and keyboard controls are uncomfortable

randomredux:

How do you people stand it? I stopped playing that staircase game because after 45 floors the only thing of note that happened was my arm falling uncomfortably asleep on the trackball.

… Trackball? There’s your problem…

Evil is relative.

So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. […] Google’s philosophy speaks directly to making money without doing evil. And it is very explicit in calling out advertising in the section on “evil.” But while it emphasizes that ads should be relevant, obvious, and “not flashy,” what seems to have been forgotten is a respect for its users privacy, and established practices.

Google’s Broken Promise: The End of “Don’t Be Evil”.

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Your side has propaganda too.

None of that is bad. But it does get bad when you get huffy and go, “Well, that’s not a message! That’s just the way things should be!” Which is exactly the same goddamned thing fundamentalist Christian parents say when they flood their kids with Veggie Tales and Davey and Goliath. They’re not trying to give their kids a message, they’re just showing them how the world works. Right?

Why The Muppets Are Propaganda.

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