Internet Accounts

Our existence is increasingly more and more virtual and complicated. We have many email addresses, accounts, passwords and everything gets mixed up in our heads. We can’t manage to remember them, to understand which ones we need and which ones we don’t need or to realize what to do with them. In this mishmash, we get to make decisions based on emotions and in the heat of the moment: we create an account only when we have to do it and we no longer remember why we did it. I think that an objective understanding of the infrastructure – seen from the “above” – that sustains our virtual existence may help; will try to present my view on the matter.

There are three levels of accounts in my mind: 1. Identity, 2. Infrastructure, 3. Utility. Let’s take them one by one:

1. Identity. Nowadays, although we identify ourselves with our personal IDs, our identities are increasingly more connected to other elements: telephone number (still present in the US) and email address. The internet knows us as an email address. So we all need a personal email address we can keep and use “forever”. It will represent and identify us in the virtual world. It can be a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, outlook, .me email address, or an address connected to a personal domain such as @myname.net, and so on. But we must have a personal email address and this is our most important asset in the virtual world.

The security of this email is vital, as “email theft” is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone. No matter how paranoid you are, it is not enough with this.

2. Infrastructure. There are three infrastructure accounts everyone should have: Apple, Microsoft and Google. These are the three producers of operating systems that you will most likely use and require you to have an account with them. Any “device” you buy these days, you must have an account with one of the three. Phones (iPhone, Android, Windows), computers (Mac, Chrome, Windows), tablets, watches etc… So we should take our time at some point and create these three accounts that we should remember and treat as something special.
What’s more, each of these accounts will try to control our lives as much as they can. Once we have them all, we will have to decide what to manage with each of them: credit cards, other applications, movies, music, maps, security…
Each of these three accounts has a control panel (appleid.apple.com, google.com/dashboard , account.microsoft.com) with which we can see and control everything happening there.
Each of these accounts is based on your email ID. If you want to be paranoid, you will have a different email for each account. However, you should at least have a different password (which should also be different from your email password) for each of these accounts and you should change that password frequently.

3. Utility. Any other account is in the “front-end”, utility area. There are two that stand out (Amazon and Facebook) and that I think everyone should have. They are similar in management terms to infrastructure accounts. We can use these accounts to login into probably other 200 accounts that we use, our favorite online stores or service providers. Whether we choose to use one of our infrastructure accounts for these utility ones is a matter of data privacy (advantage: less accounts to manage / disadvantage: we allow them access to more data than we would potentially want).
(English version by Teodora Popescu)