Password not accepted: are biometric checks the answer?

I’m old enough to remember a life in which you could confidently expect your skill for guessing passwords to be redundant by about the age of nine. That was when your mate down the road finally overcame his love of spy games and his obsessive desire not to allow you past his front door or into his garden shed without you first establishing his favourite crisp flavour. Unfortunately, however, it seems that mate, who subsequently spent his lunch hours in the school’s windowless computer room, up to his knees in punch cards, has long since taken over the world.

Last week, I again found myself in that familiar circle of hell reserved for tired and impatient and forgetful people very close to a deadline. I had already spent way too long trying to remember that week’s combination of password and user name in order to enter a Gmail account – my Gmail account – which I was unaccountably excluded from and to which I needed access in order to open a document that I had to rewrite. Having finally come up with the password – complete with recent mutations of ampersands and exclamation marks and upper and lower case letters and barnacles of numeric additions (first phone number? gym locker combo?) once created on a cheerful whim and now half-forgotten at painful leisure – I was faced with an unexpected conundrum. Six blurred photographs of street scenes flashed up on my screen along with this unwarranted question: “Which of these images contains a shopfront?”