When did everything become an account?

Remember when paying for parking required 3 things - some loose change, a parking meter and the ability to read a sign. Now, to park outside Boots for 20 minutes you have to download an app, create an account, invent a password, verify your email address, enter your registration number and inside leg measurement, add a bank card, find a verification email and enter a six-digit code before it expires.

By which time, you have lost the will to live and definitely the will to shop for shower gel.

The notion of having an ‘account’ for absolutely everything has largely grown out of one thing - data. When the internet first emerged we could mostly use it without the hassle of creating an account at every step. Then businesses realised there was an opportunity. What if every time a customer made a purchase, you also learnt a little more about them? Perhaps just their email and postal address, or maybe their date of birth too. Suddenly you didn’t just have a paying customer, you had a database. You could contact them again, send them unsolicited marketing emails and crucially, build up a much clearer picture of who they were.

Nowadays there are strict rules on data holding/sharing/harvesting and many of us readily click the ‘no thanks’ button when it comes to marketing preferences or subscriptions. But we are left with the same issue - dozens of accounts, across dozens of platforms, with dozens of different passwords (because, of course, the password absolutely cannot be the same for every account. That is apparently tantamount to leaving your front door open).

For many people, this is irritating. For others, it is a genuine barrier.

Around 4.9 million people aged 65+ in the UK don’t have the basic skills needed to use the internet successfully at all. Those people may not be tortured by having to prove they’re not a robot 3 times a day, but they are becoming increasingly excluded from key services such as the NHS and local council.

And simply having internet access doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. According to Ofcom, 96% of homes have internet access but 21% of people are described as ‘narrow users,’ meaning they use a relatively limited range of online services - older adults are disproportionately represented in the group. In today’s digital world you can have Wi-Fi, own a smartphone and use WhatsApp every day, but still come unstuck the moment somebody asks you to scan a QR code or find the security code that has just been sent somewhere else entirely.

How are we supposed to keep up?

To be fair, we have come a long way in terms of digital literacy. Millions of people who once found smartphones baffling now use them every day. But the pace of change is relentless, and just as people get used to one system, another comes along.

AI is the clearest example of that. It is developing at such speed that even people who work in technology are struggling to keep up with what it can do, what it should do and where the boundaries are.

A recent cybersecurity test involving AI agents gave an unsettling glimpse of where things could be heading. AI agents are systems designed to carry out tasks on their own, rather than simply answer questions. In one test, agents found a way to communicate with each other - they shared information, broke rules and accessed parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure they were not supposed to. This was a controlled test, not a rogue AI takeover, but it does make our daily battles with parking apps and password resets feel like the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

We are being asked to become more digitally literate at exactly the same time as technology is becoming more powerful, more autonomous and, frankly, harder to understand.

Is now the time to ask whether technology is going, or has already gone, too far?

Most people do not need a phone powerful enough to run a small country. They need a simple, well-designed device that opens up the digital world without making every day life feel like an IT exam.

That’s why we created Chatsie.