Who would use their pet’s name as their password? In the UK, one in 10 people, apparently.
According to a YouGov survey commissioned by the email provider GMX, 10% of British respondents still use the likes of ‘Teddy,’ ‘Bella’ or ‘Roxy’ when asked for a password. Around 7% prefer dates of birth of family members and 3% even use their favorite football club, the study revealed.
However, using personal information for passwords is not an exclusively British issue as 16% of Germans, 13% of French and 12% of Austrians also use loved ones’ birth data when signing up to a new service.
Despite relying on beloved pet names, British people actually fare better than their Germanic counterparts when it comes to password privacy: 54% of respondents in the UK said they were not using personal data as their passwords, compared to 48% of Austrians and 43% of Germans passwords.
More generally, GMX found that 46% of us still use personal information for passwords, a serious security risk. A total of 33% of respondents also said they were “hardly worried” or “not worried at all” about being affected by identity theft through stolen passwords – 64% said they were “concerned” or “very concerned.”
“Identity theft is a real nightmare for many Internet users. Special attention should be paid to one’s email account, because this is how you log into most services and can reset passwords. In addition to a strong, unique password for each service, you should also activate two-factor authentication,” said Jan Oetjen, CEO of GMX.