Free/Low Cost Apps for Storing All Passwords
By Barbara Perone
Imagine going to just one website and entering one password to find all the passwords for all the sites you visit frequently & all the profiles/accounts you’ve created over the years.
For those who hate the hassle of keeping track of all their passwords there are some free & low cost digital tools available to help you. One free tool is PasswordSafe.com where you can either open an account or use a PopLogin book marklet to create, and remember, a new, secure password for any website you frequent.
Here are some of the advantages to using PasswordSafe.com to store encrypted login information:
- its secure, all data & connections are encrypted
- it works in your browser with its free desktop application HyperSafe
- it works on Windows/Mac/Linux or any modern browser
- there’s no advertising or spam to worry about
- it allows you to store memos, too, and
- it does backups every four hours
Besides PasswordSafe, other digital tools out there boast that they can generate better replacement passwords for you. Others claim to offer protection from password theft that results from key logging programs, which capture each keystroke a user makes, and phishing websites, which try to capture a user’s personal information.
The tool your select depends on whether you own a Macintosh or a PC. Mac users may want to try a free program like KeePass. PC users may want to try LastPass, a free browser plug-in that also works on Linux and Macs.
Another popular option for the PC is 1Password, but it’s not free. A single user licenses costs $39.95. At press time, 1Password is also purported to have a free app to store iPhone or iPod Touch passwords.
RoboForm has a free, and paid, version of a tool to store passwords, but it’s only available to PC users. A single license costs $29.95; it costs ten dollars more for a license that lets you store web forms, notes containing sensitive information, and includes Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage. Finally, PC users may want to try Password Vault, which costs $29.95 for a single license.