Forget passwords, Google is trialling password-free logins using only your phone to improve IT security
If you’re the type who’s always forgetting their password, this might just be the most welcome news of the day for you.
Google has confirmed it is trialling password-free logins to sign in to a Google account, letting you authenticate through a smartphone notification instead.
Passwords are well established as IT security’s weakest link: ineffective and easily exposed to theft and cyber crooks.
We’re notoriously bad at passwords, insisting not only on using ridiculously weak ones like “password”, but also on having the same password everywhere, even though every cybersecurity expert will tell you never, ever to do that.
Google’s plan? To just get rid of the much-maligned password once and for all. In future, users will enter only their email address when logging into a Google account, prompting a notification to be sent to their phone, asking them to approve the login attempt. Tapping yes on your phone will be enough to log you in.
A company spokesperson has confirmed this to TechCrunch:
We’ve invited a small group of users to help test a new way to sign-in to their Google accounts, no password required. “Pizza”, “password” and “123456” – your days are numbered.
Indeed, Google isn’t the only tech giant experiment with a password-free login. Yahoo just launched “Account Key”, which works in a similar manner.