Do You Share Passwords with Friends and Family? | McAfee Blog

Do you? I do and I’ve been doing it since I said “I do.” And if you are married or at least in a committed lifelong relationship, knowing each other’s passwords is probably expected. Today, sharing passwords has become a sign of commitment, a signal of love and devotion, like a varsity sweater or friendship ring. But what’s happens when the relationship goes sour (with a divorce rate of 50% to back me up here)?

Chances are good, that your significant other (if they have your passwords) will engage in revenge tactics with your account after a breakup. Despite public awareness of data leaks and high profile celebrity photo scandals, we continue to take risks by sharing personal information and intimate photos with our partners and friends, thus putting ourselves at risk for a “revenge” situation.

28% of people have regretted (once they broke up) sending intimate content and 32% have asked their ex-partner to delete the personal content. But despite these risks, 36% of Americans still plan to send sexy or romantic photos to their partners via email, text and social media on Valentine’s Day.

A text pops up on your phone. It’s your pal, and the text says, “What’s the password again?” It might be for a video streaming app, a delivery service, or a music site. But is it really OK to share passwords?

The answer to that question takes a couple of forms.

For starters, that app, service, or site you’re sharing has terms of use. Those terms might allow for sharing. Others might not. From that standpoint, sharing might break those terms.

Secondly, sharing passwords with someone outside your household carries security risks. And that’s what we’ll focus on here.

How many people share passwords?

One set of research found that 79% of Americans surveyed said they shared passwords. Video streaming came in at 35%, delivery services at 29%, and music streaming at 9%.[i]

Yet that same research revealed something else. Only 7% of Americans said they worried about getting hacked despite all that password sharing.

What are the risks of sharing passwords?

The broader use a password sees, the more vulnerable it is. And that has a couple of dimensions to it.

The first is the more obvious of the two. Reusing passwords across accounts can lead to identity theft and fraud. Say a hacker gets a hold of a password on the dark web or directly through a data breach. If it’s reused across accounts, all those accounts could get compromised. The same is largely true of passwords that have little variation between them. When not unique, a hacker can figure out the variation with relatively little effort.

The second is a bit more subtle. Sharing passwords with people outside the household means those passwords get used on devices outside of the household. The question then is, are those devices secure? Do the people who own them use online protection software to keep themselves safer online? If not, those passwords could get exposed. One example — a friend logs into a streaming site on unprotected Wi-Fi. A hacker monitors the traffic, skims the password, and sells it on the dark web.

So, for several reasons, sharing passwords is not OK. And it brings up an important point about passwords in general. We have a lot of them. Yet each one must be secure.

I have too many passwords! Help!

So, we’ve mentioned some of the security risks around passwords. Primary among them, weak and reused passwords.

It’s no wonder people go the route of easy-to-remember passwords they use again and again. According to Pew Research, American adults feel overwhelmed by the number of passwords they have to keep track of. Depending on the age group, that feeling ranges from 61% to 74%.[ii]

That sense of overwhelm takes shape in another interesting way. Increasingly, people are doing something about it. Faced with creating strong and unique passwords, more people let a password manager do the work for them. In 2019, only 20% of Americans surveyed said they used one. In 2023, that number leapt up to 32%.[iii] A solid 12% rise that now covers nearly a third of all Americans.

So, for anyone bogged down by passwords, a password manager offers an excellent solution.

And a safe one at that.

A password manager like ours helps you protect your accounts from hackers by securely creating and storing strong and unique passwords. The very kind of passwords that hackers hate. While you’re online, it auto-fills your info for faster logins. Best of all, you only have to remember a single password.

The last word on sharing (and re-using) passwords

Don’t.

For one, sharing passwords might break the terms of use for the app, service, or site in question. Next, it can bring security issues with it as multiple people use it on multiple devices — ones that might or might not be secure.

On a related note, re-using passwords across several accounts increases your risk of getting hacked even more. Whether they’re weak and memorable or variations on a common theme, passwords like these make life easier for hackers.

As always, each of your accounts calls for a strong and unique password. And if you’re like the many who have dozens and dozens of accounts, a password manager can make that easy. And highly secure, too.

[i] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/dangers-of-sharing-passwords/

[ii] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/how-americans-protect-their-online-data/

[iii] Ibid.

People need to be more informed about the consequences of sharing so much private information with their partners. Sharing passwords with your partner might seem harmless, but it could and often does result in critical personal information falling into the wrong hands and landing on a public platform for all to see.

Today, McAfee released the study, Love, Relationships, and Technology: When Private Data Gets Stuck in the Middle of a Breakup, which examines at the pitfalls of sharing personal data in relationships and discloses how breakups can lead to exposure of private data.

Of those surveyed, the actions one’s partner took that led to a person exposing personal data are:

1. Lying (45.3%)
2. Cheating (40.6%)
3. Breaking up with me (26.6%)
4. Calling off Wedding (14.1%)
5. Posting pictures with someone else (12.5%)
6. Other (12.5%)

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, I’ll make it easy for you. Think twice—digital is forever. It will haunt you and follow you. Just don’t do it.

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