Are Seven

I began the day thinking about passwords. And believe it or not, I’m keeping this story short.

Lately, I’ve been a fan of features like the “friend finder” in Facebook: applications within social websites that allow you to add friends by putting in the user and password of your email account and automatically adding in all the people it finds by their email. Once I got over the jitters about putting in my info, I got to love it. It lets you kick off any site use quickly and easily.  I figured that as long as I kept on sites I knew were reputable, I’d be okay.

Then I read this article this morning on Techcrunch about a useful external application that was actually a scam.  Purporting to archive your email messages from gmail on your harddrive, it actually sent your username and password to the guy who built it.  Pretty smart of this guy, but pretty scary for the rest of us.

It’s one of these issues that pops up every now and then, reminding us that the web isn’t nearly as safe as we think.  Sure, we never forget about viruses and spyware, but we still get complacent.  Then again, where does it stop?  The web is damn useful (you heard it here first), but it’s stories like the one today on Techcrunch, or ones where people get their usernames and passwords stolen from them and then end up getting domains stolen or having their email addresses used for scams that make me think that we’re still a long way off from total security on the web.

Coming soon: my write-up of online financial service Mint, which has you put in the username and password of every financial service you use.  Incredibly useful or idiotic move?  A little of each!

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