Hardly. A password is usually hidden written in a notebook (or a local hard-drive) which would have to be physically stolen in order to obtain, or in a password

Hardly. A password is usually hidden written in a notebook (or a local hard-drive) which would have to be physically stolen in order to obtain, or in a password manager which is (hopefully) encrypted. I think a better analogy is in how different countries handle national identification numbers. Some countries have a publicly accessible list encouraging people to share it when commercing, these countries usually have other means of preventing identity theft. Other countries issue identity numbers in a private manner, discouraging and prohibiting distribution. These countries use obscurity to prevent identity theft among other measure. However anecdotally it seems like identity theft is rampant in the latter countries which includes obscurity in the id-theft prevention, but not in the former.