I’ve suggested several times to two close friends to adopt Bitwarden. Pfft !
“It’s complicated”
“I don’t really need it, you know? I go to few sites”
"I have some questions… " I answered the questions, gave links to the forum… “I will do it … but not now, don’t put me pressure, please”
in short: They don’t take the step.
What a shame, they don’t know what they are missing. A much simpler life.
I want to tell them bullshit excuses! Go for it NOW!
but that would change nothing.
What seems to be quite simple, or at least doable, with a little patience, for us, is actually not so simple for some people. That’s how it is, sadly.
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Yes, same here. I have offered, on multiple occasions, to have a cryptoparty with family and by the time we are done they’d have unique, secured passwords for each of their important accounts.
No one is interested. Sadly, at least two of them have had account breaches in the past.
You can lead a horse to water…
Well, I was successful some years ago getting family to use LastPass and you can imagine what the conversation was like when I told them they had to move away from LastPass and suggested Bitwarden.
I was successful in convincing one family member to adopt a password formula and password logbook. A password formula provides robust security and a memorable set of passwords. Better than password reuse.
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These passwords may be memorable, but it is an overstatement to claim they provide “robust security”. At best, such a scheme may provide some minor advantage over using one of the millions of common passwords or mutated forms of such common passwords.
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It is hard to help people who do not have a problem, or may not realize that they have it. If you protect your critical accounts with good passwords and 2fa that may also be ok for simple users.
I started using a password mngr to to store existing passwords, the idea was to get a better idea how many accounts I actually had. First later I started generating random passwords.
I’ve been able to get all of my immediate family to move from Bitwarden instead of writing passwords on a sheet of paper or using the built-in browser password manager.
I showed them the hundreds of password stealers on GitHub for Chromium and Firefox built-in password manager.
You need to demonstrate that you’re speaking from a position of being knowledgeable with security. Otherwise, why should they care what you say?
My family is more open-minded than most people. Plus, they understand technology and how open source is good etc. So that helps too.
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“It is hard to help people who do not have a problem, or may not realize that they have it"”
Yes, well seen.
It’s more : using a Password Manager looks like a new unnecessary and complex problem to them. They’re certainly also scared of doing kind of a fatal error.
They don’t see either the comfort that it will bring them, nor the security threats they’re exposed to. the goal of some hackers is to steal data, but also to steal our money if possible!
It’s also true that you don’t get in that over night, but that you need a couple of days to understand how the the thing articulates. I told them.
I began to insert my owns passwords too, of course, In BW, and I changed all of them later on the websites.
Not so simple, that’s true.
I’m personally completely amazed by how useful BW is, and how complicated (plus insecure) it was before BW, for me. It’s a so amazing tool! I had a lot of interrogations of course at first, after some time, I came to the conclusion that it’s really secure to use it.
(in case of a breach data are encrypted and useless for the thieves)
So guys we are lucky.
BW allows me to log on any website with an amazing easiness! It eased the way I use internet so hugely.
I will use an image. Suppose you are riding a bicycle with under-inflated tires.
No matter how hard you pedal, you go forward slow.
you are not aware until someone explains you why you have to put x bars of pressure in your flats, and until you see the difference.
That’s what does a password manager, you go quickly, and it makes your Internet life easier, and you win a lot of time.
So, for me, for us, it’s something so obvious that of course that we’d like to convince our friends and family… 
That’s it.
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If they are saying “don’t pressure me” then perhaps not pressuring them is a good idea. I have been through this with LastPass with family members and realized that everyone has their quirks and one of ours on this forum is online security. The reality is that they likely use Apple and Google which both have viable, secure, easy to use, encrypted password managers. If they have enabled this and are saving their passwords in either of these products, they are as secure as they are going to get as if they used BW/1PW/LP. It won’t have the features that Bitwarden has but they are protected. They may still use weak passwords, duplicate passwords, and not turn on 2FA (the three biggest risks in password managment). No password manager solves that if a person doesn’t see the risk and doesn’t care. Passkeys will protect them increasingly over the next ~5 years.
Hi, 222,
When you become a Bitwarden user, you end up changing all your passwords, choosing strong ones, and non identical ones on different sites. You understand the necessity to do that, because and thanks to the BW password generator, a key tool.
Passkeys : Interesting. I’ve just read what is it.
If a password manager is quite something to understand, the “passkeys” principle is even more complex to understand. I think I got the idea.
I’m not sure at all that it will imply more freedom for the users. it seems to be the opposite.
By the way, last week I’ve been studying and experimenting encryption free tools, and I have set a cloud synchronization on several cloud services.
BW helped me a lot allowing me to lose less time on password management, and focusing on more interesting things.
I only synchronize few personal encrypted files. And as you certainly know, cloud synchronization doesn’t t mean backups… Another crucial question.
Apple :
(I wrote this, below, about them because you mentioned them, for some reason you have deleted the post, now. No problem at all)
About 15 years ago I bought a "Mac book White " laptop.
It worked for less than two years.
It had a design error, the edge of the top was crumbling on the edge. A known problem.
The apple store had changed it for me but I knew it would start again after the warranty, because the same causes cause the same effects.
Then the inverter broke down, (black screen) I disassembled and discovered that the hinges were made of very fragile plastic. Then i felt anger.
I decided that I would never ever buy Apple hardware again. Always overpriced, sometimes poorly designed, always locked ecosystem. and in case of trouble you have to go to an apple-store, almost mandatory.
I met a young guy, a smoker, through a pal, who had a large Imac. Yellow appeared in the screen, it was his cigarette smoke that got inside! Another design error.
The Apple-store changed the whole screen part, for free. An exorbitant cost for Apple (for the whole customers!) Only problem: it does not change the cause of the problem. A design error again.
I don’t like Apple, I’ve been boycotting them ever since, and I will never buy again an Apple device.