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Screw passwords! Soon you might log in with electronic tattoos, or pills

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Image used with permission by copyright holder

There’s lots going on nowadays with various ways to remember your password. We reported yesterday on Amazon’s foray into the world of login plugins, giving other websites and apps the ability to let their users to log in with their Amazon accounts.

But that type of logging in seems like child’s play after the recent announcement from Motorola’s leader of special projects, Regina Dugan. Formerly the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the United States Department of Defense, she boasted that at her previous gig, she “got to do a lot of epic shit.”

According to AllThingsD, she wants to talk about bringing that to the masses, in the form of wearable computers. But she’s not talking about gadgets like Google Glass. She’s thinking more along the lines of electronic tattoos and pills.

Here’s how it works: The tattoo would be embedded on a person and could be used to authenticate a user on a computer or phone. Motorola is partnering with a company called M10, which is responsible for the technology.

Not a fan of body art? How about swallowing a pill? The other innovation unveiled is a pill that a user can swallow, which then switches on, powered by the person’s stomach acid. The pill then transmits an 18-bit signal, essentially making the person a walking password.

Don’t expect to see any of this entering mass production any time soon. It’s all in the very early stages. And Dugan assures that these would be optional methods of logging in; they won’t make these required methods of logging in.

Joshua Pramis
Former Digital Trends Contributor
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