Tech Talk

My kids are mostly grown up enough to look after themselves now, but my youngest is 15, so it’s still important for him to know whether he is supposed to be with me or his mum on any given weekend. I finally got fed up with all the texting back and forth that this entails and shared my own Google calendar with him. Theoretically, all he needed to do is sign in to Google, tick the shared calendar there and do the same in Calendar on his iPad. Except that he’s 15 and only uses email addresses to buy things on the App Store and sign in to Netflix. His iPad remembers his addresses and

He’s 15 and only uses email addresses to buy things and sign in to Netflix

passwords for him, so he doesn’t need to. If he needs to sign in for a new app or service, he just creates a new Gmail account for the purpose and promptly forgets the password for that too. So this two-minute job of adding a shared calendar actually took three days. The forgotten password recovery process for one password, sent an email to another account that he didn’t have the password for either and so it went, from one account to the next. This chain eventually terminated in a form that had to be reviewed by a human Google employee to recover his accounts. Maybe in the future we will all authenticate our accounts entirely using iris scans and gait recognition. Until then, kids, no matter how grown up you think you are, please write down your passwords somewhere.