Good morning: Passwords cause friction

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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

About The Author

Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.