A user holds their android phone.; Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Last week, Google announced plans to do away with passwords for good: 

Google I/O

“We have a phone, and these phones have all these sensors in them. Why couldn’t it just know who I was so I don’t need a password, I should just be able to work.”   That was Dan Kaufman, head of Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects division, announcing the future roll-out of the company’s Trust API. Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s a lot of tech jargon that I don’t understand. But fear not, Dave Johnson, editorial director of eHow Tech and editor-in-chief of techwall.com joined the show to help wade through all the tech jargon and break down just what these trust scores are.

Interview Highlights

What are trust scores and how do they work?

“What’s different here, instead of relying on a single thing, like a password,  the trust score is this thing that’s running in the background all the time. Paying attention to how you behave with your phone. So, it notices your typing patterns, where you are which is known as geolocation, your voice pattern when you talk, maybe facial recognition, when you look at your phone and other things as well.

And all of these things are signals to the trust API that says, either this is or this isn’t you. If you score high enough in each one of these signals then it says, okay you can use the program that you want to use but if you don’t score high enough then it might fall back to asking you for the old fashioned password instead.”

How is this safer and more secure than passwords and PINs?

“Google has already done a lot of work, they’ve been working on this for a year now. They first announced it at their Google I/O event which was a year ago…they’ve done a lot of on the ground testing…Similar in a way, solutions have already been out for awhile.

For example, if you have an iPhone there’s a thing called touchID where all you have to do is put your fingerprint on the phone and it knows who you are…so these technologies are kind of established and are fairly trustworthy. And I think that the trust API is going to be significantly more so because it uses so many more signals to figure out whether…you are who you say you are.”

Next month, Google is testing its trust API with several large financial institutions and if all goes well, the software will be available to Android app developers by the end of the year.

To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.