Hunting Down and Remembering Passwords is now Consumers’ Biggest Frustration When Using Their Mobile

REDWOOD CITY, CA–September 12, 2017 – Independent research conducted in the US and UK on behalf of Openwave Mobility, a software innovator enabling operators to manage and monetize mobile traffic, has found that consumers are on average spending 12 full days of their lives searching for usernames and passwords. Americans are spending on average 12 days and 1 hour of their lifetime trying to remember and reset passwords, while Brits spend on average 11 days and 17 hours. Extrapolating this to the rest of the global online population, this represents a frustrating productivity sink of 16.3 billion hours a year!

The research also shows that remembering usernames and passwords for online services is now the single largest frustration of consumers’ experience with their mobile devices. The time wasted on remembering or re-setting usernames and passwords is even more frustrating than buffering videos, dropped calls and badly-targeted advertising.

As mobile now represents the main medium for accessing the internet, mobile operators are in a unique position to relieve the widespread frustration associated with usernames and passwords. Technology is now available that allows mobile users to log into websites and apps without needing to remember either. Lending credence to the opportunity, the majority of consumers (76%) say that they would find it useful for mobile operators to handle sign-ins for apps and services.

The survey also looked at who mobile users trust to store personal data such as username/password, location, internet browsing habits, buying habits, and address. As few people would have failed to miss the news stories about online hacks over the past few years, unsurprisingly, nearly half of mobile users (47%) say they don’t trust anyone to store their personal data. Despite this, mobile operators rank comparatively highly with mobile users and are trusted second only to online banks. Significantly, people trust their mobile operator more than social networks, search engines and government intelligence services when it comes to storing personal data.

Openwave Mobility provides a digital identity solution, SmartIDM, integrated with the GSMA’s Mobile Connect, a secure, seamless authentication solution. Together these match a user to their mobile device, allowing subscribers to securely sign into websites and applications with a single click. Uniquely, SmartIDM, extends the scope of Mobile Connect to provide seamless authentication for services using encrypted traffic (HTTPS), which now represents the majority of mobile data traffic globally.

“Frankly, the username/password paradigm is one of the biggest frustrations of modern-day living, and, as the research has shown, it represents an absolutely massive waste of our precious time,” said John Giere, President and CEO, Openwave Mobility. “But the encouraging note here is that consumers are keen to accept help from their mobile operator, who they evidently trust more than their search engine or social network”.

The survey on subscriber attitudes to online verification and subscriber data was conducted over August and September by independent research agency Censuswide who interviewed over 2000 people in the US and UK.

 

About Openwave Mobility

Openwave Mobility empowers mobile operators to manage and monetize encrypted traffic. Based on the industry’s most scalable NFV platform, our solutions alleviate RAN congestion, create new revenue opportunities and unify subscriber data. The company provides solutions for IP traffic management, mobile data optimization, targeted promotions and subscriber data management.

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