> Even if you can tell a compelling story about how they carefully encrypt everything right now, you're always a silent update away from it all being dumped on the internet.
This is also true for your operating system updates, browser, browser extensions, compilers, the infrastructure for your email service provider, any libraries those things use etc. Not to mention your local password manager. Even if you don't accept push updates, do you evaluate the code? What if the vulnerability was timed to pop a few weeks after release? What if it was included in an update that patched a major vulnerability so you went faster than your normal process afforded? Even if you have a local firewall that stops external connections from unrecognized programs— what if it's a whitelisted program or the operating system or the firewall itself?
Why would you a password manager's encryption less than you would trust your email service's encryption? I'd bank on the password managers' being a lot more robust.
What about RATs that could access your local password database? RATs are a lot more common than cloud service breaches.
And as I mentioned previously, Dell shipped a hardware trojan in 2010.
There are tons of single-point attack vectors in this chain. I'm not a security expert, but storing encrypted data in cloud storage seems less likely than others be a viable target.
> Having your main email account compromised seems like an absolute nightmare where you potentially lose control of every single service that you subscribe to (banking, utilities, cell phone (so maybe 2fa is even broken), medical portals, social media, etc).
> Having your entire set of passwords compromised is like that on steroids. Rather than your attacker having to use your email to get to each of those services one at a time, they just have them immediately. And who says you'll even know that your stuff was compromised?
Let's say they did compromise your email account. Since only a few of your accounts are genuinely consequential to nefarious criminals, the number of password resets they'd need to execute might set them back, what— 5 minutes if it's not scripted? And all of it is moot if you use a 2FA method aside from email? Beyond that, considering how much more frequently email accounts get compromised, singling out the storage location for password manager databases seems pretty arbitrary.
I just don't see how the opposition stands up to a comparison of attack vectors.