At Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains how to strengthen your passwords and better protect your privacy. Why would want to take the time to create difficult-to-guess passwords?

Do you use the same or similar passwords for several different important sites? If you don’t, pat yourself on the back; if you do, you’re not alone — one recent survey found that half of people online use the same password for all the sites they visit. Do you change your passwords often? Probably not; more than 90 percent don’t. If one of your accounts falls to a hacker, will he find enough to get into your other accounts? For a scare, try this: Search your e-mail for some of your own passwords. You’ll probably find a lot of them, either because you’ve e-mailed them to yourself or because some Web sites send along your password when you register or when you tell them you’ve forgotten it.

Now that you’re wary of easy-to-guess passwords, how do you create strong ones?

Start with an original but memorable phrase. For this exercise, let’s use these two sentences: I like to eat bagels at the airport and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota. The phrase can have something to do with your life or it can be a random collection of words — just make sure it’s something you can remember. That’s the key: Because a mnemonic is easy to remember, you don’t have to write it down anywhere. (If you can’t remember it without writing it down, it’s not a good mnemonic.) This reduces the chance that someone will guess it if he gets into your computer or your e-mail. What’s more, a relatively simple mnemonic can be turned into a fanatically difficult password.

Which brings us to Step 2: Turn your phrase into an acronym. Be sure to use some numbers and symbols and capital letters, too. I like to eat bagels at the airport becomes Ilteb@ta, and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota is M1stCwarlsIbaT.

That’s it — you’re done. These mnemonic passwords are hard to forget, but they contain no guessable English words.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 and is filed under Identification, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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• New York Times: How to Securely Manage All Your Passwords