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Online Overload – It’s Worse Than You Thought (2015) (dashlane.com)
1 point by dredmorbius on Nov 2, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



A bit of background on this.

A few years back, another HN user commented in a thread that they had over 700 entries in their password manager. I chalked that up as a power-user problem, though a notable datapoint. My own list is similarly extensive.

(packet_nerd reports this from 7 months ago, though I recall this being several years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899)

Reading through an Experian report on online identity and fraud, the statement that the typical online user had "about" 100 accounts struck me. I've tried sourcing this claim, which is uncited, and it seems strongly similar to the Dashlane study linked here. The 100 services number is worldwide, for US users, it was 130.

Which is from 2015, which is to say, four years ago, nearly five. The rate of growth, which is often more critical than the absolute scale, is given as 15% per year. Which, applying the rule of 70, means the doubling time is five years. If that trend has persisted, the number is now on the order of 200 - 260.

There are some caveats: Dashlane are apparently basing this off of a base of 20,000 users, who have an inbox-processing tool installed, which classifies messages, and from which the accounts-per-user information is gleaned. Even a 20k nonrandom sample of a large userbase my have profound biases (this is a self-selected set of users who've installed a specific processing tool, etc., etc.), and it's likely that the actual overall median and mode values are much lower. But the values are still high and growing rapidly.

Upshot is that I really don't think that an accounts-based, relationship-based approach to services can scale. In the spirit of "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop" (Stein's Law), the question becomes how this might stop.

We might see a vast consolidation of services, the widespread adoption of throwaway accounts, or some form of non-acount authentication (e.g., PGP signed messages, rather than authenticated users). The likely direction is quite uncertain.




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