Who should you tell your passwords?

I’m sure at one point in our lives, we’ve all been faced with this question about who to nd who not to trust with our passwords. But, to be honest, the only person you can trust with your passwords is yourself. You may think your partner deserves to know the password to your email or facebook account in case they need to gain access and help you with somethiing at one point, but it might not always be safe with them.

Consider this. You gave your girlfriend access to your Netflix account, because, why would you both have individual subscriptions when you could share your premium subscription, right? Let’s say your girl has a friend and they start talking about this movie that she streamed on Netflix and decided to share the login with her friend, you know, just a harmless favour pto a friend. Imagine that friend was never a friend to your girl at all, but a social engineer who found a way to get that password, as a way of gaining access to your mind and the way you set your passwords.

According to a study conducted by google in 2019, about 52% of people use the same password accross multiple platforms. i imagine you’re someone who doesn’t want to think too hard about their password, so you make it easy enough that you can remember it easily and decided to use it across different platforms, such as your email, Netflix, Faceboook, IG, etc. Thus, by giving your netflix password to her friend, you girlfriend might have exposed you to attack, without even knowing it. Because, knowing your email and password means they could potentially access many other things you’ve linked your email to, including but not limited to your medical records, academic results, bank records, bank accounts, etc.

Some of s probably tell other people our passwords in case of an incident where we lose them and have to ask them to remind us. What is they end up writing it down somewhere, like “Janet’s facebook detail -Imaginaryjanet_s.email@gmail.com password:janet’s_password” and maybe they have a friend or relative who somehow locates the piece of paper or text document where your password was saved, your social life suddenly isn’t as secured as you thought.

A wide variety of tools have been invented for keeping track of your different passwords across the internet. Tools like LastPass, KeePass, 1password, Dashlane, Bitwarden. With applications like these, you only need to remember just one password and make sure it’s secure and whenever you want to log into an account, you just need to remember the password to your password manager and you can copy it off there.

To set a secure password, you need to make sure that it consists of capital letters, small letters, numbers and special characters, and make sure it consists of at least 12 characters. An exampe of a secure password is “@B82dvG<0498post3r”. How could someone guess that exactly? lol