I’ve been doing some research this week on the subject of identity theft and the role played by all of those passwords we are forced to come up with and keep track of in our daily lives.

Came across this related article at PopSci.com that looks at some ways - present and future - to guard your data against hackers and other people who would do you harm.

Among the tools:

Personal Pocket Safe by Black Box Innovations: Move bank statements and other vital info off your PC and beyond hackers’ reach. Instead, store it on the Personal Pocket Safe, a one-gigabyte USB key fob protected by military-grade encryption. Files are indecipherable until you enter a three- to 10-digit PIN, which could take 10 years of button-pressing to guess. Hackers won’t find your files after you unplug, either, since the key holds its own data-viewing program and saves nothing to the PC. It will, however, save files to a secure online back-up service, so you can retrieve them if the key is lost or stolen.

Despite the billions of dollars lost every year to identity theft and related crimes, experts suggest that most people don’t do nearly enough to protect themselves.

Which gets me back to my research. How do you go about managing your passwords? Anyone who spends much time online is bound to pick up a few dozen passwords. You aren’t supposed to write them down. They need to be unique. They need to have a combination of characters that are upper case, lower case, numerals and symbols.

I’d love to hear from someone who has a interesting/unique system for tracking passwords. Someone with a lot of passwords.