A Better Password Problem – Premium

Several weeks ago, I was trying to login to the Hilton app on my phone and could not remember the password. I knew the password was saved in Chrome but trying to guess what it was, I locked my account after too many failed attempts and had to reset the password which means that I had to re-enter it in Chrome as well.

This is a mild inconvenience but with every single service seemingly compromised each day and I know that I reuse passwords across different services; it was time to finally get serious about changing my workflow.

There are many options out there for password management, you can use Chrome to save everything, LastPass is a good option but I ended up choosing 1Password after it was highly recommended from a significant number of people.

Why a password manager? It's quite simple, instead of remembering 600 different passwords for every service that you utilize, you remember one and let the password manager remember the rest. The challenge is that you have to get away from letting the browser do the 'remembering' and instead let the app do it for you.

This isn't easy because it's significantly easier to double click inside a login prompt, select the account, and have it login. At least, that's how it used to be, but modern password managers have made it significantly easier to use these services and it's about time everyone seriously considers switching.

Previously, I had been toying with LastPass which is a great alternative to 1Password but it's up to you to decide which service fits your needs better. The primary benefit of LastPass is that it has a free offering, 1Password is a premium service but if there is anything you should be willing to pay for, it's a company who is storing all your passwords; pricing for 1Password varies on how you pay for it but it can be as little as $3 a month if you pay annually.

The biggest benefit of using a password manager, especially with a mobile app, is that you can now seamlessly login to apps on your phone and the desktop by logging into the password manager. If you are using iOS 12, Apple now lets password managers inject your login info into the keyboard so you don't even have to open the app; it's all quite literally at your fingertips (image on the left).

But this isn't unique to 1Password and even Apple's own Keychain can use this. The point is that these solutions bridge the gap between desktop and mobile better than any browser can with the added benefit of keeping you more secure.

The best part of these services is that they can now replace the login prompts inside of your browser as well (image right); most solutions now let you click inside a login prompt and access logins for that site via a browser extension. It wasn't too long ago that this feature was not available and it has removed the final friction point for me that kept forcing me back to the browser storing the content.

Further, 1Password integrates with haveIbeenpwned.com, a service that...