Why use 1Password?
Published: Monday 16th May 2022
I was always somebody who was never concerned about using the same password for every account I made, meaning everything from my YouTube account to my HelloFresh account all shared a password. If anything, I thought this was a great idea as it meant that I would never spend hours trying to log into an account as I always knew what the password was going to be.
It was only when I started to see report after report of people’s personal data being shared over thy internet because there was a flaw in a system that I started to think that if my data was shared, they would have access to all my accounts because of the one password I was using. It was at that point that I decided I should start using a different password for each account. However, my biggest concern with this was how am I going to remember so many different passwords? That’s where 1Password comes in.
1Password is a place where I can safely store all my login details, including passwords. No one else has access to your 1Password, making it the perfect place to store important information. One of my favourite features of 1Password is the fact that you can use it to generate passwords and these passwords are customisable, such as you can choose the length of the password, whether to include numbers and whether symbols are used. This means that I can create strong passwords that I don’t have to worry about remembering.
Another feature of 1Password that I never expected to use but has now become an important feature for me is the two-factor authentication. Some websites require you to have a way to verify it’s you when logging in, whether it’s by sending you a text or getting a two-factor authentication code. Using the two-factor authentication from 1Password is so easy I never use my phone number anymore. It takes just a few seconds to set up and as I’m using 1Password to store my passwords anyway, I’ll already have the app unlocked when I need the authentication code, meaning there is no extra work for me.
There are so many features to 1Password that I never expected to use or even understand, such as being able to add important documents or being told when a website is compromised so you should change your password. But there’s one more aspect of 1Password that I think makes it one of the most useful tools. This feature is an internet extension. This means that when I’ve got to login on to a website the 1Password extension will pop up and I can use that to autofill my login details, making logging in so quick and easy that I don’t even give a second thought to logging in now. If I had to search out my password each time, I needed to log in I wouldn’t bother and would just use the same single password I would be able to remember, but as it automatically pops up it works perfectly for me.
It is safe to say that after using 1Password for a while now I would never go back to using a single, unsecure password for all my accounts. It may take a few seconds longer to log in to accounts now but I log in knowing my accounts are safe and secure, so a few seconds is worth it.
