This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The open-access edition of this text was made possible by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from The Leverhulme Trust.Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What-s an -identity theft- in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how -what we know- became -who we are-, revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password. Ranging from ancient Rome and the -watchwords- of military encampments, through the three-factor authentication systems of Harry Potter and up to the bio
