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I finally listened to my old IT guy about password managers and ate my own words
My coworker Dave, who ran IT at our office in Fresno for 15 years, kept bugging me about using a password manager. I kept blowing him off because I memorized everything and felt fine about it. Last month I got locked out of my bank for 2 hours because I reused a password that showed up in some random breach, and the site forced a reset I could not do fast enough. Dave just looked at me and said nothing, which was way worse than if he had yelled. I signed up that night and spent 3 hours changing 40 logins one by one. Now I want to know, does anyone actually use those built in browser ones or is that still a bad idea?
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the_evan7d ago
This is the same pattern I keep seeing with car maintenance and dental checkups and pretty much everything else. We all know the right thing to do but we put it off until something breaks and then we pay for it twice, once with money and once with stress. Your Dave moment reminded me of when my mechanic finally showed me the bill for ignoring my brakes, sometimes the quiet look says more than any lecture ever could. Built in browser managers are better than nothing but they usually lock you into one browser and sync stuff through your Google or Apple account, which is fine until you switch devices or that account gets hacked. In my experience a stand alone manager with one strong master password is worth the small hassle, but your mileage may vary depending on how many devices you juggle. The bigger win here is that you finally broke the reuse habit, that's the real thing that was gonna bite you again eventually.
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