The fabled knight, myths, legends and ballads say, rode laced in shining armour. The knights of yore have since ridden their way to sunset. The modern knight in a data-driven world is at the beck and call of the keyboard or the mobile phone. His armour has changed as well. For the protection of data — be it personal information or that related to commerce — is only possible with the help of the password. World Password Day, which falls in May, is an occasion to remind the global collective glued to their phones, desktops, laptops, tablets — the technological wonders that modernity towed in along with it — of the importance of the role of the password in securing this gold mine of information.

The popular perception is that the password — a string of characters that are necessary to let a user gain access to computing or digital systems — is, like tech gadgets, the gift of modernity. But this, as is often the case with what constitutes the popular, is not quite true. Passwords have been around for a while and in a myriad forms. The secret to the longevity of the passwords has to — this is hardly surprising — do with the culture of secrecy itself. Secret societies were in vogue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of these clandestine organizations were incubators of democracy. They came up in response to the prevailing orthodox milieu and their members were encouraged to engage in frank and fearless discussions on critical matters of the day. But a taste of this forbidden — delicious — freedom was predicated on the ability to furnish the right password on the part of their patrons. But passwords were not merely sentinels of a shared privacy. They can be looked at as ciphers to understand things about the world and its residents. Research, for instance, has shown that the majority of people use some kind of private information — names, year of birth and so on — while creating passwords. This herd response comes with risks. Data security analysts — today’s high priests — insist that such a choice weakens password protection. Apparently, data suggest that 10,000 of the most commonly used passwords can help unlock 98 per cent of all global accounts.

The centrality of information has led to the discourse on passwords being limited to issues of data protection and data theft. This is unfortunate. The password — that mysterious scroll of digits and alphabets — whispers other secrets. For instance, the password poses a formidable challenge to mnemonic toolkits. Multiple accounts require multiple passwords, each of which needs to be distinct. The sheer volume of these secrecy codes necessary for modern living is enough to challenge even the sharpest of minds. At a more fundamental level, passwords and their veneration embody the cat-and-mouse game between keepers and finders of secrets. The outcome of this ancient game integral to human culture is decided by the sanctity or the violation of the password.