Does privacy protection have to get in the way of usability in technology? Not if the two talk to each other, writes Danny Bradbury

Angela Sasse really dislikes long passwords. The professor of human-centred technology heads up the Information Security Group at University College London and spends a lot of her time thinking about how we can make our computers and software both usable and safe. It certainly isn’t by making people remember long passwords, she said.

“In reality that means people stop using services, or work around the mechanism,” she said, blaming those who build the applications for not thinking smarter. “It’s bad design. The problem is that they don’t go back to ask what other protection goals there are – and then consider different ways of managing it.”

Related: Security v usability: cracking the workplace password problem

Credit cards are pretty good at usable security; most people just don’t worry about it.