Sunshine Protection

Due to the growing prevalence of security breaches and privacy breakdowns in the online world, more attention is being paid to the importance of identity protection. For as far back as statistics are available, data shows us that internet users in North America tend to be remarkably uncreative when choosing passwords. While most of the most commonly used passwords are simple strings of consecutive numbers or letters (123456, QWERTY), it is the passwords that do not fit this categorization that hold a deeper insight into our culture. While many of these less common passwords can be traced to popular trends such as sports (“football”, “baseball”) or entertainment (“dragon” and “princess” inspired by Game of Thrones), some are too generic to ignore. The passwords “Iloveyou” and “letmein” possess both a certain humor as well as a sense of immediacy which is highly relatable: creating a new password is a frustrating act of personal, private invention. It is where bureaucracy meets creativity, and it’s not pretty. Although this is already changing as automatically generated passwords come into use, it is currently a common practice in our daily lives to create a brand new secret word that must be unique and private and protected, different for everywhere we go.

Which brings us to “sunshine”. Sunshine is different. It’s not a string of letters, and it’s not clever. While some use of this password can be attributed to North American solar eclipses in both 2012 and 2017, this explanation does not entirely explain the prevalence. There is something else going on which is bringing us to “sunshine”. We can’t know what it is, but there is certainly something deeply meaningful about everyone having their very own private sunshine, and thinking it’s unique. On one hand, it’s comforting to think about us all ‘looking to the heavens for a key’, and all finding the same thing, the Sun, the source of all our energy, the same Sun that we all share. On the other hand, there is something dark and hostile about the fact that we’re all walking around with our own private light, each of us thinking we are unique and protected, when really, we are all keeping the same secrets behind the same doors with all the same locks and all the same keys.