Why are bank card PINs only 4 numbers while people advocate for complicated and lengthy online passwords?
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Banks had to sell customers on the benefits of ATMs. When ATMs were new, desktop PCs were normal to find in homes but not ubiquitous. There were still a *lot* of people who didn’t use technology in their day-to-day and had to be coaxed to embrace ATMs.
My grandmother outright refused to use ATMs because they reminded her too much of computers, and computers made her feel stupid. She could have put some effort into being a little less stupid, but she opted instead to simply reject the technology.
Somewhere in the late 90s I was waiting at a bank machine for these two little old ladies who were trying to figure out how to use it. One wanted to withdrawal $20.00. She got to the part when you enter the dollar amount you want and she entered “20” and hit “OK”. The machine told her she couldn’t have that amount. You can’t withdraw $0.20 from a bank machine in my part of the world. You have to enter *all* the digits. That means $20 requires that you enter ‘2000’ and the decimal point is added for you.
They couldn’t figure it out. They had a display in front of them that showed them they had entered $0.20 and they were getting mad that it wouldn’t give them $20.
These are the kinds of people we had to convince to adopt the tech. It wasn’t easy. > 4 digits on the PIN would have only made it worse.
That’s the kind of stuff banks had to figure out how to overcome. **There was no internet with complex passwords to compare to.** If you say to someone who isn’t sold on the technology, “You have to remember a 6 digit PIN” would not have been very good.
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