Blog

The Benefits Of Password Sharing

March 19th, 2009

Why would anyone ever want to share their passwords? Actually, the need to share passwords is much more common than you may realize. Let’s take some simple examples:

• You may need to share a wireless internet password for your apartment so that each roommate can have access.
• Your family has a Netflix account and each of you need to know the password to log in.
• Online photo album – sharing pictures that requires a password.
• One roommate is in charge of paying the cable bill and sets up an online account to do that. Your other roommate is in charge of paying the gas bill and sets up an online account for the apartment. You are in charge of paying the electricity bill for the apartment, so you also set up an online account. However, if one of you is out of town, the others will need the account information if they need to log in and pay the bills.
• At work, everyone needs to know a common access code to get into the building that changes every week.

Right now, if you wanted to share the above passwords, you would need to manually devise a way of doing that (send out an email, write it down somewhere, etc.). This becomes even more challenging when you use different passwords (because you don’t want to use the same password to your bank account as the password you give your friend’s to access your Netflix account) or you need to change the password (because now you have to tell everyone you updated the password).

Mitto gives you an organized, convenient, and secure way to share passwords with people you trust. Here are some of the benefits of using Mitto’s password sharing feature:

• You know who has access to what passwords
• If you change the password, it gets updated for everyone. They will always have access to the most up-to-date password. This is great, for example, for businesses that need to change passwords when someone leaves the company (to prevent unauthorized access or sabotage by disgruntled employees).
• You can use strong, separate passwords with these accounts without worrying about needing to remember them. Strong passwords make it more difficult to guess a password, and even if one of these accounts is breached, none of your other accounts are vulnerable.

Access Levels

Right now, you can give your trusted friends (who must have a Mitto account) three levels of access to a login/password:

• View Only (which means they can see the password and use the one-click login if it is available)
• View and Edit (same as above, but they can also update the password)
• View, Edit, and Share (same as above, but they can also re-share it with other Mitto users)

 Best Practices

When you un-share a password in Mitto, we strongly recommend that you change the password for that service, and then update that in Mitto. This way, you are not vulnerable if the person who you had previously shared it with remembered or stored the password.

We are continually improving our features, so if you have feedback as to how we can improve our sharing feature, please let us know.