#SOL17 Day 20

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anyone else use it, and get a new one every six months. ~ Clifford Stoll

How many passwords do you have in your life?  I don’t know about you, but I have decided I have too many.  A couple of years ago, I bought a “little black book” at Barnes and Noble and began to log all my passwords onto its alphabetized pages.  It was made especially for this task and was more detailed than just using any old address book. I am the bill payer at my house, and my husband use the computer only to check mortgage rates and car prices.  If something happened to me he would not have a clue how to pay bills online. He is definitely a paper check and postage stamp kind of guy.  I thought putting all the passwords in one place would be helpful to my daughter who would take care of all these things in the event I could not.

At home, Google saves most of my passwords online, and I don’t even have to think about them.  Things like my AOL email account, Facebook, and Twitter appear without me having to put in a password.  That’s great when I am working at home on my desktop computer, but when I need to access these sites on another device I am at a loss.  So, then I end up changing the passwords.  The problem is, I forget them before I get home and change them in my book. 

I know that the experts say that you should not use the same password for multiple accounts, but it is so tempting!  I think that the plan for this weekend is to go through the entire black book and change all the passwords.  I am glad that they are written in pencil!