Coincidentally, this very morning I was talking to a friend about Google, more specifically about its password manager. I will not say his name, so as not to compromise him, but the fact is that he told me that he created some time ago a document to save some passwords. He kept that document so he could retrieve it when he needed it, and he evidently protected it with a password, a pretty strong password. The problem is that she was so secure that now she doesn’t remember it, so I imagine that at this time she will be restoring passwords in various services.
The first instinct when learning of a situation like this is to laugh, of course, but now Raise your hand who has never forgotten a password. And it is that the times are long gone when a simple password was more than enough to protect access. Data leaks, attacks that combine brute force with dictionaries, social engineering… have meant that we have to opt for much more complex passwords, that we can never repeat a password between various services and, furthermore, that we change them from time to time. All this for the enormous number of services in which we currently sign up.
A few years ago, using a password manager was a good option, something recommended, but for some time now it has become a necessity, in something that we must do if we want to ensure the security of our accounts. Google has been very aware of this for a long time, and in response they added, many years ago, a function in Google Chrome that allowed passwords to be saved and, in addition, added it to the autocomplete function, thus allowing it not to be It is necessary to write the username and password every time we want to log in to a service.
Since then, Google Chrome’s password manager has made it difficult for other services of password management, because the dominant position of Google Chrome among browsers, added to the convenience of this function and, something important, the free service (in my case I pay about 30 euros per year for the one I use) are many points to favor. Against? Well, the Google service has fewer functions than the paid ones.
However, Google seems determined to close that gap, and for some time now it has been improving the functions in this regard. A little less than a year and a half ago it took a very important step, allowing users to edit their passwords, and more recently it improved the function to identify and change weak passwords, in addition to offering multiple administration options.
And now we know, from Android Police, that Google’s password manager will soon allow adding notes to records, another common function in password managers, and that I personally find one of the most useful. With this change, Google’s password manager is even closer to services of this type, and regardless of whether you are a user of them or not, because in the first case, you will see a new function added to it, and in the second, the rest of the services will have to be creative to think about what to offer their users so that they continue to be so.
Personally, as I have indicated before, I use a paid service to manage my passwords, but what I did not say before is that for a while now I also use the Google manager, and from time to time I wonder if it is worth maintaining the other service. So far the answer has always been yes, but if the search engines continue to add functions to their password manager, and the rest of the services do not react, I am not so sure that this will continue to be my answer in the future.
And on a more personal note: Jose, don’t worry, in my case I was lucky and was able to recover it, but I have also forgotten a master key. And I put my hand in the fire that it has also happened to more than one of the people who are reading.
Is it your case? Forgot a particularly important password? Do you use a password manager? And yes, I have not forgotten that there are some highly recommended free and open source options, do you use any of them?
