this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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Just came up with my father again.
He blames me that mother forgot her phone's and Google password because I recommended against it being a word.
I mentioned encryption, "not necessary unless you're doing something illegal".
When mentioning lack of privacy with targeted advertisements, he said that he actually really likes them, because he bought a couple of things he wanted for years.

I don't really have good arguments.

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[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (21 children)

I'm going to be real. I was part way through an explanation before I deleted it. What you are dealing with sounds like a situation where you simply won't win by using logic. To continue to labor under the presumption that a good and logical reasoning will have an effect is just going to stress you out and achieve nothing.

Google password because I recommended against it being a word.

IT nerds help me out here, but I've been under the impression that the best defense against brute force attacks is a very long password, and the idea of sprinkling in special characters or numbers is outdated. Something like "iwenttothestoreandboughtabirthdaycake" is a more secure password than "$6jds_*WghP6".

edit: Also the mantra to never write down any passwords is more of a workplace piece of advice. I personally think, and this would probably be helpful for older people, that writing down passwords in a notebook which is kept secure in their home is pretty safe. Short of a home invasion, that notebook is safe, and having it can encourage them to diversify their passwords on different accounts. So, if you are going to keep at the issue, taking an angle of using something they are more comfortable with like a paper notebook is going to be accepted more easily than trying to sell them on a password manager or something.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 week ago (9 children)

It doesn't even have to be that long. 12-16 characters and it'll be infeasible to brute-force for the foreseeable future. But unless you're talking a high-value target like government, military, or executive suite at a company, no one bothers to brute-force anyway because there's easier ways to gain access.

The biggest issue with password security is reuse and sharing. The most secure password in the world doesn't mean a damn thing if you use the same email/password combination across a hundred different websites, because all it takes is for just one of them to suffer a leak and now your credentials are in a dump with millions of others that can be bought for a song and a dance.

This is why it's imperative to use 2FA for your most important accounts, because it can mean the difference between an attacker getting access and hitting an error page and trying the next poor fucker's credentials instead.

But also, no one wants to try to remember a hundred different unique passwords so it's also a good idea to use a password manager. Chrome and Firefox both have them built-in (note that Firefox stores passwords unencrypted on disk unless you set a master password!), but there's also services like OnePass or Bitwarden that have stronger guarantees.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Is there something that would perhaps also work on Android? Also, how do you move the passwords from password manager into the fields? My problem with clipboard is that anything can read it. Of course, that means there has to be something to exfiltrate the data, but 1 problem is better than 2.

Keypass has apps which supposedly support autofill (I've never bothered with setting them up because I hate using a phone), but it might go through the clipboard. You can also set it to clear the clipboard so its at least not just sitting there indefinitely.

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