Passwords and other securanoia

 My security minded friend sent me another article today on how I should be securing my security cameras from unwanted watchers.  I replied thusly:

I keep inside cameras turned off when I'm not on vacation, and care little about the others.

I do not pay for monthly services and use my own local storage cards on my digital cameras.*

My analog cameras have a local hard drive for storage, and are all outside, but do have internet access except when the app sometimes mysteriously requires a password I can't remember.

My biggest problem is remembering passwords.  

Passwords and endless security measures I do not want cause me more grief than anything else and I hate being forced to change them or use passkeys or other additional security measures.  I can usually deal with two factor identification but sometimes it causes problems too.  I've always been ultimately able to access my credit accounts but always worry that at some critical moment I won't be able to.  I have never been subjected to identity theft and have never lost money to any kind of theft.  Once I lost my physical card and was able to cancel all the charges I didn't make, and another time I was billed for something I didn't order or receive but was able to get that cancelled too.  I have been ordering things online since 1996 and more than anyone else I know and sometimes directly from small companies.  I think more people are taken in by fishing scams that say you are being charged for something you didn't order, than are actually being charged for things they didn't order.

I worry more about losing access to things and quite often I've been unable to access my cameras remotely because the apps for the digital and analog cameras will unexpectedly require me to remember a password.  Keeping track of all my passwords has been very difficult even with a book dedicated to that.

I keep my computer hard drives unencrypted because my final plan is that all my creative works be accessible to my heirs and/or the general public rather than lost forever, but Apple keeps trying to force me, against my wishes, to encrypt them, which would mean they could be lost forever just for that reason.

No matter how many times I tell iCloud that Chrome on my Desktop Mac is a "trusted device" it never remembers that, and forces me to go through the Passkey/Password/2 factor identification dialogs every time I want to access my photos.  I then have to be very careful not to be sent down the Passkey rathole.  I presume this is a form of desktop warfare, and I think much securanoia is just that.  It's not really about keeping me secure, it's about forcing me to use some particular set of apps.

Passkey seems like the most dangerous thing of all because if I were to use Passkey for everything and I lost that, I'd lose access to everything.

*I did once enable monthly services.  That was on my November trip last year to California when I wanted to monitor my cats.  The AI on the monthly service plan never seemed to identify cat presence outside correctly and wasn't useful in finding what happened to my oldest cat a day after I left home that killed him.  I tried using my phone but quickly gave up.  By the time I got home and was prepared to more seriously use check it out from the comfort of my computer with a big screen, the data had 'expired' because it was older than the days allotted.  The only thing I was able to do was remove, save, and download all the data from my SD card on the outside camera which on which the raw video was still available.  But I found it's basically watch 24 hours of video and figure out what happened.  I can hardly do it for 10 minutes at a stretch.  So it was a waste of money to enable the monthly services for online AI, and it's not worth it to me to plug my existing 24 hours of video into a generic AI to figure it out.