I often get prompted in Settings and elsewhere (like here) to upgrade to TFA. I have six apple devices using one appleid: three each for me and my wife. I wish not to use TFA—ever. It is off now. How may I acquire from Apple the courtesy of honoring—forever—my opt-out of a mechanism which would be a time-consuming inconvenience for the two of us?
iPad Mini 5, iPadOS 14
You can't. I know your situation, I too get urged to enable two factor authentication every time I log onto this discussion forum.
F J Poblam wrote:
I thank you for your prompt reply, Limnos. I guess I should have expected as much. It seems to be another case of Apple deciding what customers SHOULD want rather than what they DO want: a disappointing trend for me.
Keep in mind it is about as much about protecting Apple as it is about protecting you. Apple is legally liable for the personal information users store in their system and so moved to a more secure secondary security level than security questions since many millions of users do store valuable personal data online with Apple.
While I can understand some people don’t like it, I do wish more companies would take online security of my information more seriously. I do see many banks that offered SMS 2 factor login codes moving to more secure encrypted notification systems (like Apple uses for 2FA). But them some big financial companies like Fidelity still solely use account passwords for security.
No system is perfect though. Physical dongles are a PITA. Security questions are simply idiotic and are known to offer very little in the way of added security. Voice ID sounds good in theory but has yet to move into major use by anyone. 2 factor logins are the most common method anyone uses, but most offering it still use SMS or email when much more secure delivery systems exist.
I do still believe completely in the concept that there is no such thing as highly convenient security. Convenience and security are opposite ends of a spectrum, which at the extremes are mutually exclusive.
You can understand it to a degree. I use my Apple ID for almost nothing, and certainly none of the bells and whistles introduced in the past 5 years. If somebody hacked my account (and it would require true hard-core hacking because I don't use passwords like "Freedom") then all they would get is the privilege of logging in on this forum and answering people's questions. :-)
However, accounts have transitioned from simply being a way to post to a BBS to now being linked to thousands of dollars of value in purchases and credit card access etc. But the user community hasn't really gotten any smarter (dare I say they are less smart because now things are simplified and marketed to a broader community and not just geeks with a certain degree of savvy). So Apple has to protect itself and users from messing up big time. Of course it is a nuisance for others but if it's a matter of mildly annoying a few vs. having to deal with a bunch of people who only put passwords like "liberty" between them and the contents of their credit cards, well...
I thank you for your prompt reply, Limnos. I guess I should have expected as much. It seems to be another case of Apple deciding what customers SHOULD want rather than what they DO want: a disappointing trend for me.
Yeah, I understand to degree. Possibly not relevant for us since our password isn’t something like drowssap but rather something with a little more entropy with a length of 23, a character set size of 5, etc. But we let the bits fall where they may. In our case TFA is about as useful as an ashtray on a Harley.
Keep two factor authorization off and never ask again?
