You know it’s a serious relationship—when your boyfriend or girlfriend is willing to share their passwords with you. And when you find you’re actually creating a password the both of you can use together, well, wedding bells can’t be very be far off.
Welcome to 2012, where a password manager is romantic.
A recent New York Times article revealed the peculiarly digital age phenomenon of sharing passwords, as previous generations shared locker combinations as tokens of trust in romantic relationships.
Yes, truer love hath no teenager than to let someone else access their Facebook (News - Alert) page. All we need now are those little Valentine’s Day candy hearts saying “Be My Password Manager.”
“It’s a sign of trust,” Tiffany Carandang, a high school senior in San Francisco told the Times, explaining why she and her boyfriend took the momentous step to share e-mail and Facebook passwords. Cherry Ng, 16, told the Times that such a step means “They really trust each other.”
So one way to know the relationship is over isn’t just when he or she gets the locks changed so your key doesn’t work anymore, it’s when you get the “Invalid Password” screen.
Such anecdotal evidence is borne out by more rigorous studies. The Pew Internet research service found recently that about 30 percent of online teens say they share “one of their passwords with a friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend,” noting that the youths regard such actions as “a sign of trust and intimacy.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, online girls, the Pew (News - Alert) study found, “are much more likely than online boys to share passwords with friends and significant others (38 percent vs. 23 percent), and older teens ages 14-17 are more likely to do so than younger ones (36 percent vs. 17 percent).”
But the course of true love never does run smoothly and Forbes weighed in on the practice, calling it “a spectacularly bad idea.” Comparing the pressure to share passwords with the pressure to have sex, Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill advocated “digital abstinence,” arguing that yes it’s romantic, “the same way that Romeo and Julietis romantic, in a tragic, horrible, everyone- is- miserable- and- dies- at- the- end kind of way.”
Hill notes that when you give someone else the password to your e-mail on the principle that you shouldn’t have anything to hide, you’re violating the privacy of everybody who e-mails you who might not know that a third party is perusing their messages. It’s the digital equivalent of letting your significant other eavesdrop on your other conversations without the people you’re talking to aware that they’re being listened in on.
And hey – if you really do trust each other, why would you need to see each other’s private information for yourselves? We might be old-fashioned here, but isn’t part of the romance just that, trusting for what you don’t know?
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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Jamie Epstein