There is something that we are not doing enough and we should for our own security: eliminate old accounts

The other day, for a comment from my boss about an email that came to him, he gave me to look The keychain in which I store all my passwords. I wanted to see how many session was stored. It turns out that they are 891.

Eight hundred-Novent-and-one.

It is impossible for you to use or 10% of those services. Moreover, surely a majority corresponds to an afternoon experiments, impulsive records for a punctual download or accounts created to try something that I forgot to the quarter of an hour. My digital history is a cemetery of abandoned intentions.

I am not an exception: most we accumulate accounts like who accumulate boxes in the storage room. “Someday I will need it,” I thought surely. “What a laziness erase the account now,” I assumed internally. And the disorder grows.

The problem is that, unlike the storage boxes, These accounts are still alive. They continue to receive privacy policy updates, changes in terms of service, database migrations. And most importantly: they are still risk vectors. And we don’t even usually do something as healthy as change passwords from time to time.

Each abandoned account is a back door that we have forgotten to close. When LinkedIn suffers a security gap, not only affects those who use the day platform yes day too. He also compromises who registered in 2012, used it for three days and never returned.

These data are still there, inert but vulnerable, waiting for their turn in the next “We have been hacked“That I get to the mail.

Psychology after this accumulation is predictable. Creating an account is usually free and immediate. Eliminating it requires effort, navigating deliberately complex menus, multiple confirmations. Companies have optimized the record and the exit, the Dark Patterns They send. It is logical: each abandoned account remains a digit in its database, a metric of which to presume before investors.

The solution passes through change our digital habits. Just as there are those who practice “if I have not used a garment in a year, I get rid of it,” we should apply periodic audits to our digital accounts. A quarterly cleaning of unused services, such as who goes down in tracksuit to fix his storage room.

It sounds tedious, but It is less tedious than dealing with the consequences of a digital identity theftjust what we expose if we leave too many doors without closing. Especially if we have The bad habit of repeating passwords.

Our fingerprint should be a reflection of who we are. Not who we experienced for ten minutes in 2016.

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In Xataka | There are users who pass from passwords. And they go to “I forgot my password” to generate them again and again