Watchdog: Visualize how old your passwords are

Today we’re releasing a quick followup to our last Watchdog experiment. The goal of Watchdog is to make it easier for you to make wise decisions about your privacy and security. However, even if you’ve taken care to avoid password reuse, we often forget to regularly change our passwords. Just as with password reuse, there currently doesn’t exist a good way to see which of your Firefox passwords need to be replaced. Enter the Password Age Visualizer.

Once again, data visualization makes it a lot easier to see where to start.

On my blog, I wrote:

“This is a bullet graph. You can think of it as a series of timelines. On the left, you can see a visual hash for each of your passwords. Each bar shows how many days it’s been since you first used that password.

Once a password has been used for over 200 days, its bar turns red. Every time I’ve used that password on a new site, a black tick marker appears on the timeline. Looks like my oldest passwords are my most frequently used. Uh-oh.”

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.

Check out the full writeup on my blog, and if you’re really interested, take a look at the code.