Please enter your password... Something we are asked multiple times per day and, of course, can often not remember. After scouring through files to find that one precious document containing all your passwords, rifling through old emails, usually we just click ‘Forgot your password’.
Shopping accounts, bank accounts, memberships, personal emails, work emails, multiple social platforms, related social tools and profiles – there are now so many things requiring us to enter, and worse, remember a password. For us PRs, the list continues even further – passwords for our clients’ social media accounts, Trello, Basecamp, coverage trackers, media tools – it just keeps going.
Luckily, the browser extension LastPass claims to offer a solution – managing all your passwords across all your devices for you. All you have to do is remember one master password.
Once downloaded, you can save down passwords and add sites manually, import them from your email or simply let LastPass automatically save passwords when you log in on new sites. Different to a browser keychain, passwords are not automatically generated in the password field when trying to log in to accounts. If others use your computer, for example, they cannot simply access your accounts. There is also the option for a special business service for teams to be able to easily share and safely store passwords, so there’s no need to hand over a massive document filled with passwords – thank goodness!)
Data security with this certainly crossed our minds. Offering secure and reliable data protection, though, is something LastPass guarantees and in fact prides itself on. With strong encryption algorithms and local encryption, only you can access your information – LastPass can’t even see it.
Traditional passwords are on their way out, as we witness the (slow) rise of multi-factor authentication mechanisms, voice authentication and even fingerprints. But, while we wait for a better solution to become wide spread, LastPass could be a great means to free up some head space and safely de-clutter our brains of those many jumbled up words, letters and numbers.