Exit Strategies

Written for Funeralcare magazine March 2017

My mother was fond of saying, unkindly I thought, that my feet entered the room half an hour before I did.

Seems my digital footprint is like-sized. The shoes don’t fit any more, so I’ve been disentangling my online presence from that of my employer. After twelve years it’s no small task. Separating myself from Evans’s has been like juggling multiple personalities. The part of my brain still capable of rational thought poses this: “If it’s hard for me to delete my own work-based footprint, how hard must it be for those attempting to do the same for the dead?”

Enter the idea of a digital legacy. A way to transfer management of your online presence to someone you trust, in the event of your death or incapacity. A Google search reveals that the average internet user has more than 100 online accounts – from banking, store and utility accounts to social media. Hard to keep track of, and no wonder many of us use the same password for every one. Or did. A friend of mine, who I’ll call Kay to protect her identity, got caught in a high-profile security breach some years ago which gifted that one password to a hacker. What followed was a time-consuming journey to ensure the password to every account (yep, over a hundred of ‘em) was unique.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to do it. A better way than that Excel spreadsheet that contains all your passwords. There are a huge number of password managers to take the pain away. The one I use, LastPass, has proved invaluable in separating personal from professional. It has allowed me to easily document all the sites and connections that my employer needs access to. And not that I needed any encouragement, but I have literally forgotten all my passwords, as LastPass does the remembering for me.

Choose your product, and secure it

Let’s start with a choice of three free offerings. LastPass, Dashlane, and LogMeOnce can each be downloaded and installed as an extension to your internet browser.

The key, literally, is to choose a strong password to protect all your other passwords. A combination of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters – that is easy for you to remember but hard for anyone else to guess. And you do have to remember it - your master password is not actually stored by your chosen vault provider. Forget it and you’ll have no choice but to start all over again. LastPass does let you save a password hint. Make sure its cryptic enough to prompt your memory without giving the game away to a hacker.

All three products have great multifactor authentication – in English, more than one way to prove you’re you to get access to your vault. They range from simple lock code generators like Google Authenticator (a smartphone app widely used across NZ government sites) to LogMeOnce’s impressive photo, fingerprint and PIN number options. They also allow you to register trusted devices – each computer, laptop, tablet and phone that you use regularly.

Store your passwords and make them strong and unique

When first installed, each product can go through your browser history and add any sites you have saved a login to. Whenever you visit a new site that requires a password, they will ask you if you want to save the site credentials. On your next visit, your username and password can be automatically filled in. This is a breeze for most sites using a standard username/password form. For more complex login pages, Dashlane and LogMeOnce both have sophisticated form autofills, and LastPass has an option to “Save All Entered Data”.

Having safely stored your passwords, it is a good idea to make them all strong and unique. Most products automatically highlight weak and duplicate passwords, and can generate and update your passwords individually or all at once.

Sharing/synchronizing across multiple devices

Each product has its favours and foibles when it comes to using it across more than one device. Because it’s vault is stored online, LogMeOnce syncs passwords across Windows, Mac and Android. Similarly, LastPass lets you sync freely between computers, tablets and phones. Its free version works slightly differently between Windows, Android and iOS devices and the Premium (paid) version allows you to sync freely across devices. Dashlane on the other hand, is device-specific: each computer, laptop, tablet or phone has its own vault, and only the Premium version lets you sync across devices.

Secure password sharing and legacy

Now for the spare set of keys you leave with someone you trust. LastPass appears the most flexible of the three. It allows you to share a single site login with a single user without making the password visible, and to revoke access at any time.

LogMeOnce allows you to share either all your data, or up to five individual passwords, with one person. LastPass has an Emergency Access feature that allows you to specify one or more people to share your whole vault with. Similarly, Dashlane has Secure Sharing, which allows you to share a group of your passwords with an emergency contact. LastPass and Dashlane also let you specify a waiting period, so you can cancel any attempt to access your data early. Handy if you exceed your life expectancy?

Even if, like me, you’ve decided to live forever, there are still plenty of reasons to use a password manager. Some have a mind-boggling array of features, and only you can know what you’ll find useful. With easy importing and exporting between the main players, don’t be afraid to test-drive each of the products on your shortlist. I’ve got a couple of weeks off – that’s what I’ll be doing.

Yeah, right.