Imagine trusting Google with your passwords
Who do you trust with your passwords?
Proton. Bitwarden
I would understand self hosting but those are for-profit entities as well. They might be subject to less regulatory oversight because they’re smaller. They might not have as many resources to keep my data safe. They have benefits for sure but trust is not this easy to judge.
The difference is their business model is privacy. Google’s business model is advertising. I’m Proton’s customer, but advertisers are Google’s customers.
I don’t trust them in general but I’m certain Google doesn’t use my passwords for advertising.
Sure, but they also don’t really have a business interest in keeping your passwords safe. If they have a breach, you either move your passwords or you don’t, they don’t see a financial hit. If Bitwarden or Proton have a breach, they lose paying customers to their competitors. They have to be better than their competitors to get your business, Google just bundles it with the rest of their stuff.
Also, Google is a massive target. They control the most popular browser, so there’s a ton of value in exploits. Bitwarden and Proton are competitively smaller, so the attacks are likely to be less sophisticated vs attacks against Chrome. The surface area of attack for a separate password manager is also quite small, so it’s comparatively easier to secure.
So yeah, that’s why I use something outside my browser. I use Bitwarden for my password manager (I intend to self-host it soon), and it works well.
So far big guys didn’t leak passwords but 1password and LastPass did.
The real issue is that Google stores your passwords in plaintext. That’s why they survive a password reset, or apparently now can be shared with others. Proton and Bitwarden encrypt your passwords so that nobody but you can access them, or at least in the case of Bitwarden, you can share with other users using pre-shared keys.
Plaintext passwords was a fuckup that they self-reported 5 years ago and affected some business users. Most browsers don’t really encrypt locally stored passwords.
Between the for-profit businesses of Google and bitwarden, I’m going to trust bitwarden more.
Based on prcinpipes Bitwarden is an obvious choice. With things like passwords I’m leaning into giving my keys to a company that, if it comes to be, can pay gargantuan ransoms.
Nice try, social engineer /s
KeePassXC/keepass2android/Nextloud. Those are the major entities with access to my passwords/kdbx. Not including Linux, and if I exclude Linux because it’s open source, I should technically also exclude all other of those things, because they’re also licensed under GPL. So the only entity I have to trust is me, and that’s actually a security risk.
No thanks.
Cool I guess?
Personally, I use Bitwarden with my wife. We pay $10/year, and we share a few things:
- streaming services
- online shopping services
- some bank accounts
Basically, if it’s something that doesn’t allow separate logins and both of us will need, we share them.
Everything else is not shared. $10/year is completely fair to me, and I’m probably going to upgrade to the family plan at some point. I plan to self-host soon, so I’ll have to see what plan we need to do that.
Bitwarden, DNS and email are the 3 services I pay for.
Passwords can’t be inaccessible, free DNS services never have an LE API, and email is extremely difficult to self host. The uptime and security I expect for these things means I’m happy paying someone else to take care of it.Bitwarden seem to be a great company and doing everything right (even though they are being annoyingly slow with passkeys on android, my only fault with their service).
Their subscription is extremely reasonable, so even if I figured I could self host it, I’d rather pay bitwardenWhat do you use for email?
I honestly don’t like passkeys, at least how they currently work. It seems the intent is to replace MFA with just one factor. I prefer 2FA with TOTP separate from my password manager, which means an attacker would need to exploit both to access my accounts.
That said, it’s a sticking point for many people, so I hope Bitwarden gets it soon. I just probably won’t use it.
From my understanding, passkeys is supposed to be something you have (phone) and something you know (pin) or something you are (biometrics)
I still use hardware keys like a yubikey (something I have) and my normal password via a password manager.
Uh oh, Google’s starting to catch up to Nextcloud.
They’re probably doing this to catch up with Apple though :)
Why the hell would I do that?
We watched a show where there was a concept called a Dead man’s switch, and my wife asked me if I would ever do something similar, but include all my passwords, for everything.
“Absolutely not.” I told her.
No one can know about my smut logins.
Why?
We’re using it for streaming services, anything with loyalty plans, insurance, catering plan, routers and other common utility non-personal stuff.
And yet you still can’t share numbers, names and addresses via Contacts.
Calendar supports sharing really well, with the option to show other people’s calendars without merging them. And docs, of course. But not something as simple as an address list.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google is now letting users securely share passwords with members of their own family group over the internet, making it easier for everyone in the household to access passwords for shared services like Netflix.
The new ability is included in the Google Play services update for May 2024 that’s rolling out now, as reported by Android Authority.
The new password sharing feature just applies to ones that are stored in Google Password Manager, the company’s service that natively stores your passwords and passkeys in Chrome and Android and is linked to your Google account.
As of today, the new password sharing feature works on mobile — but apparently not via Chrome on desktop, yet.
Once you share a password with one of your family members, a copy of it will be saved into that member’s own Google Password Manager.
So if you want to share a password with anyone else, you’ll need to use Nearby Share to zap it over in person or use more rudimentary and / or less secure methods.
The original article contains 194 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
