I’m helping a lady who can’t remember her passwords, gets confused and either tries to change them or gets really frustrated and creates new accounts. Is there any way (on the Mac) to have her passwords supplied automatically and to lock them they can’t be changed? Is there a good password management app that will do this for her? Having them written down and taped to a readily visible place doesn’t work. I set up her accounts using my email address as a rescue address so I’m notified when she tries to change her password, which is sometimes multiple time in a day.
I don’t know why Keychain isn’t supplying her passwords and I’m trying to help her from 2000 miles away, so It’s difficult to check. I’ll be seeing her in a couple of weeks, though, and I’d like to arrive armed with a solution. (For the love of all that is holy!)
I use LastPass and have found that to be a pretty good password manager. It stores login info for all sites and fills them in automatically so she wouldn’t have to remember them.
Another vote for LastPass. It just works, and as long as you have the master password you can access the other passwords. It even can create random passwords for you.
Keychain won’t supply passwords for sites that have ever had the “Do not remember password for this site” button pressed. To reset this behavior, go to Safari (I assume she’s using Safari) -> Preferences->Passwords, and make sure AutoFill is turned on, and then delete any sites that have “never saved” in the Password field.
I can tell you from extensive experience that this is only a partial solution, at best.
The real issue is: people have no idea what function they are giving their password to. They can’t tell me if it’s their email account, login, router, Wifi, some webpage, etc, etc.
I actually think Lastpass has a horrible interface, and is not a good idea for this situation. I set it up for my wife, who is not super technical, but far from helpless, and it regularly confused her. Filling things in the wrong fields, not filling where it should, etc. Also, this wasn’t really an issue for my wife who understood what it was, but at least on a Mac it looks really out of place (like a Linux application almost) which I think might be confusing for some people. That may be better on Windows.
I think 1Password is a bit better, and that’s what we’ve switched to at home, but I’m still not really sure it’s a good idea for someone who is really easily confused. With any of these things there are times that they don’t fill the form correctly, especially if a site changes the way their login form works. Also, none of these solutions are going to be able to prevent someone from changing the password on the site itself. You may be able to lock down the password safe so the entries in it can’t be changed, but that won’t stop someone from hitting “change password” on the web site (and in fact this may be worse because it would prevent the new password from being recorded).
For people who are this [del]stupid[/del] inexperienced with computers (i.e. my own grandparents) there is only one solution: use the same password for everything.
And never, ever,ever type any important information on your computer.
No banking, ever.
And if they want to use a credit card, buy a $100 pre-paid Visa card at Walmart. Your lose 5 or 10 bucks on the service charges, but you gain complete peace of mind.
If you’re incapable of using the fraud protection because it is too technical for you (i.e. passwords, updated antivirus, etc), then, yes, you can get real peace of mind for a mere $5 by using an anonymous visa card.
Another vote for Lastpass. It completes all of my passwords for me once I’ve typed in the first master password. If you make all of her sign ons the same she’ll hopefully learn not to over-type them.
Thanks again. I’ll test LastPass and 1password and see if either of these might work for her.
…and chappachula, in this lady’s case, it’s is not a problem of intellegence or experience. She has both. The problem is what happens to memory at 82 years old. There is no learning, now. Only forgetting.
