Password Age Visualizer for Firefox

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 15 Mar 2012

On top of using different passwords for your different accounts, it is also a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis. As part of the Privacy Watchdog initiative, a project launched with the goal of making it easier to take wise decisions about privacy and security, the Password Age Visualizer add-on for Firefox has been released. The Password Age Visualizer comes after the release of Password Reuse Visualizer for Firefox.

The Password Age Visualizer does precisely what its name suggests: it uses data visualization to let you see for how long you’ve been using your passwords and thus helps you figure out which ones are due for a change.

The age of your passwords is displayed on a color coded bullet graph. The color red indicates that the password is older than 200 days and should be changed. Change the password and the color of the graph will change from red to blue. The black ticker on the graph represents each time you’ve used that password on a new site. Here’s an image to better put things in perspective.



“I think information about how old your passwords are, coupled with data about which ones are being reused, makes it a lot easier to see which passwords need to be changed,” said the Head of the Privacy Watchdog initiative, Paul Sawaya.

You can find out how old your passwords by getting the Password Age Visualizer add-on from Mozilla here. And you can visualize your password reuse with the abovementioned Password Reuse Visualizer add-on, which is available for download here. With the help of the Password Reuse Visualizer add-on you can see which passwords you’ve been using the most and on which kinds of sites you’re using them on. You can read more about the Password Reuse Visualizer here.

So to sum it up with the Password Age Visualizer and the Password Age Visualizer Firefox add-ons which were released as part of the Privacy Watchdog project, you can see which passwords you reuse and you can view which passwords are old and should be changed.



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