Emoji’s such as smiley faces and others pictographs used commonly by many people nowadays have been put forward as a possible replacement to the humble password or PIN by a British start-up called Intelligent Environments.

As reported in The Guardian recently, the concept lends itself to our natural ability to remember pictures much more vividly than standard characters like letters and numbers.

Add to that research that shows 64% of millennials are using Emoji’s almost exclusively in their communication, and one wonders if this trend just might have some merit in the future.

The method proposed is that instead of entering your password or PIN, instead you would select a sequence of 4 Emoji pictures from a possible set of 44.  The math behind this says that an Emoji “password” would therefore be one out of a possible 3,748,096 combinations.

However, the question of whether this would be more secure over the standard password, and in particular a 4-digit PIN is open for debate.

While technically your 4-digit PIN is only one from a combination of 10,000 choices, the implementation on your mobile device tends to be much more secure, by the fact that incorrect attempts will result in gradually increasing timeouts – making it much more difficult and impractical to crack easily.

And consider that, just as with passwords, it is possible that people will select Emoji sequences that are quite predictable.  For example, selecting Emoji’s that tell a common story, like a Man, a love heart, a Woman, and a bunch of flowers; it’s quite possible people will end up selecting popular Emoji versions of the 1234 PIN equivalent.

On the positive side, think of how hard writing down your Emjoi “password” is going to be for those of us who aren’t artistically gifted.

If you are concerned about only using a 4-digit PIN on your mobile device, however, there are options you can change:

• On iPhone/iPad you can switch off the “Simple Passcode” option under settings and select a much longer password which is great if you’ve got the TouchID fingerprint reader.

• For Android users, depending on the version you have, you can select from PIN, Password, and also Smart Lock features. Using the Pattern option (where you draw a pattern on the screen) is not recommended as the smudge marks you leave on the screen can be enough to give it away!

For more information keeping your mobile device safe, check out the video below 6 Tips to Secure your Android Phone video.