You use long passphrases with letters and numbers. You’re careful to make sure your passwords are always unique. But there may be one threat to your digital security that you haven’t fully considered: love.
WIRED UK
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
While everyone should know that sharing login credentials is a big security no-no, in the context of a romantic relationship, the reality is that it’s far from unusual. “Basically everybody shares accounts,” says Jason Hong, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “If you're not sharing accounts, then you are the oddball.”
Hong is part of a research group focused on social cybersecurity, which takes real-world human behaviour as a starting point for security practices. “If you look at cybersecurity today, they sort of assume that people are individual actors, and sort of rational,” he says. “A lot of research has shown that that's not really the case.”
In a 2018 paper, Hong and colleagues found that, out of 195 participants, 86 per cent were sharing at least one account with their partner, and up to 39 accounts in extreme circumstances; the median number of accounts shared was four. Many also made new accounts specifically to use together. In a 2020 study, Hong’s team asked couples to keep a diary of how they shared accounts; one observation they made was that people used shared accounts more during Covid-19 quarantine, especially entertainment accounts.
Often, the reason for sharing accounts is simply a matter of convenience, especially for cohabiting couples. Sharing one Netflix or Spotify account, for instance, saves money, and using one Amazon account may help couples stay on top of hou ..
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