Environmental impact of PhoneFactor

Posted  September 4, 2007 By Steve

I was surfing the Blogosphere™ the other day and I ran across an interesting post about the environmental impact of the tokens used in other two-factor systems. While I can’t claim to have architected PhoneFactor with environmentalism in mind, I’m pleasantly surprised to note that PhoneFactor does seem to be relatively environmentally friendly.

You see, most token-based systems have to manufacture, um, a token! That costs materials, energy, transportation (it’s a physical device), and so on. When you factor in the costs incurred by the IT department shuffling tokens around, storage costs, and the like, it’s a nontrivial amount of environmental impact.

The beauty in PhoneFactor is that it simply re-uses a device you almost certainly already have – your phone. No additional hardware, shipping, management, storage, etc.

To really analyze the situation, you’d have to factor in things like extra electricity used by the phone and the phone networks for PhoneFactor authentications, but my guess is that PhoneFactor is a long way ahead of tokens.

So: use PhoneFactor and save a tree!

-Steve (who has been known to hug a tree on occasion)