Home > News

Your Password Manager’s Autofill Feature is Hurting You

By Laura Tucker
Your Password Manager’s Autofill Feature is Hurting You Featured Image

We all know what they say about passwords and security. To keep your data and information safe, you need to have a long involved password, and it needs to be unique to that website. If you use a browser-based password manager with an autofiill feature to help you with that task, though, you may want to reconsider, as advertisers are able to gather data from those helpful managers.

The Situation

news-password-manager-advertisers-situation

Often, passwords are required to have at least one uppercase letter, lowercase letter, and number, and many times a symbol as well. But the more websites and apps you connect to, the more passwords you’re required to remember. Unless you have a really good memory, it just becomes too tough to remember all those logins with unique passwords.

This is when we start relying on a browser-based password manager. It’s so much easier to have all those difficult-to-remember passwords remembered in that password manager. It will autofill your login information, taking care of all the work for you. And sometimes it will even suggest unique passwords for you, to take care of that whole password task.

But research from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy is claiming that while those password managers seem ultra helpful, they’re also being ultra hurtful as well. They’re also allowing advertisers to pull data and information from the password manager browser add-ons that are able to access the autofill feature.

Stealing Your Information

news-password-manager-advertisers-stealing

These add-ons actually use a fairly simple system to steal your information and send it to advertisers. After you ask the add-on to save your information, a tracking script is in place but not visible to you.

After you have signed on with the autofill feature, and you visit a different page on the same site, it includes a tracking script which puts up an invisible autofill form that is again filled in automatically by your password manager, but this time you don’t see it.

The third-party script grabs your email address from that autofill form and sends it to third-party servers, and they use that information to track you.

These tracking scripts were found on 1110 of the Alexa top one-million sites. While those scripts are only collecting your email address from the autofill feature at this point, collecting your password may turn up in future scripts.

Keeping Your Information Safe

To be sure that you’re not falling victim to this ploy, you need to make sure that your browser-based password manager doesn’t automatically fill in that information for you without any input from you.

An example of a password manager that doesn’t exploit you with scripts is 1Password. It’s designed in a way to avoid all of that. A user has to take a specific action in order to get the password to be filled in via the autofill feature.

While there are several different ways to get the login information to be filled in, in every one of those ways the user needs to give the browser the approval to do so. 1Password won’t do it automatically for you, meaning a third-party script doesn’t have the ability to sneak in there and steal that information from the autofill feature.

If you’re concerned about your email being leaked to advertisers and maybe your passwords at some future date, you’ll want to make sure that if you use a browser-based password manager that you use one like 1Password that doesn’t fill in your login information automatically.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.