And you still can't use Bitwarden in Firefox's private mode.
Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
31–40 of 154 posts
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything should be documented. We have a binder with checklists that walk you through gaining access to everything the other partner might need in the event of death (email accounts, domain registrar, bank and brokerage accounts, auto/home/life insurance, ongoing recurring bills of all sorts). Bitwarden databases are exported to paper, 3 hole punched, and put in the binder on a schedule. Both partners get setup wit…
In an accident or disaster (house fire, flooding, earthquake, you name it), this binder will be gone. This binder should be in a secret manager.
Keep a copy in there if you want for convenience, I argue you’ll still want a paper backup somewhere. Opsec is hard, people are fallible.
“What was the password?”, “Where’s the Yubikey?”, etc. These are not the failure scenarios you want to encounter during a tragedy (speaking from experience).
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#33The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
Have one email account on your domain (example.com) and use that for everything important. Use a long random password for the account and don't 2FA it. Share that with your family. That's probably all they need to gain access and reset your other accounts.
If you 2FA the email account, you risk locking you and them out permanently for many services. I've written some about this. If you care to read it:
https://www.go350.com/posts/now-they-have-2fa-problems/
Also, if you 2FA other things and aren't really careful, you may lock them out even if they know the password and/or are able to reset it. That is by design.
This problem is growing larger every year as more sites enable or mandate 2FA. It's impossible for humans to manage this at scale.
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#34The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
I don't do anything with my online accounts; for assets I rely on beneficiary information and my will, and I expect that the online accounts will just die off (as CCs close, etc). I've always wondered if I should do more. What are the downsides of relying only on wills and beneficiaries? What might I be missing with this super basic estate planning?
Their concern seems (to me) to stem mostly from how the rest of their family will be able to use the household services if they pass.
Should the family have to setup new netflix accounts with new watch history tracking because the primary account holder passed away? Given how long it would take for the cc's to get cancelled and netflix to notice, would it be smart for your kids or partner to get that kind of gut wrenching reminder of what was lost months after your death?
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#35The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
My wife and I recently had to settle an estate (pre-covid), and most subscription services are quite easy to work with. The estate we were dealing with was a bit of a mess, so we basically had nothing to go on except some bank/credit card statements. We were able to contact the banks, deactivate all the credit cards, and contact some services to request refunds for several months of service. We didn't have any trouble getting those refunds after providing the death certificate.
Obviously, it would have been much less of a hassle if we'd had the account information from the beginning, but there were much more annoying problems to deal with than deactivating Netflix.
If you're really concerned about this, make sure you have a will in place and beneficiaries defined on your financial accounts. That is probably just as important as making sure your dependents have immediate access to your money.
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#36The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
safety deposit box at my bank with my accounts, passwords and 2FA recovery codes in a notebook
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#37Bitwarden is just fantastic. It's open source, the interface is clean, works fine on all platforms for me and pretty much everything is free. If the devs browse here, thanks for making it.
How dependent is it on them as a service? If their website/service disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, would I still have access to my passwords locally? I'm still hesitant to use any form of password management that relies on cloud services. I still like Keepass (with auto-updates disabled for security because their updater uses HTTP, of course), for my purposes. I can Sync my keepass file any number of…
As far as I know they only sync a data blob, so you would just not get any updates.
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#38The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
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Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#39The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…
Having gone through an unexpected, young death where nothing was recorded, I’ve come to the opposite conclusion: anything significant enough to care about already has next-of-kin processes established such that the Right Person will be able to sort it out.
Indeed, when it comes to stuff like finances, at least where I live, touching them post-death creates issues when the legal channels confirming there’s no contest over next-of-kin haven’t been run to ground. In those situations, having a password means nothing.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prep a will and have processes in place, but it gave me a lot of reassurance that I did not need to worry so much about this.
Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps just an old ipnone or android with a fingerprint sensor and another installation of bitwarden. You can keep the phone's passcode written down because its only use is to start the device. Then configure biometric log-in for bitwarden as an alternative to a distinct passphrase. In the event of a total blank, you should still have access as long as you retain a finger.
Requires a passcode before allowing biometrics
Not the person you responded too, but I imagine you could likely get a custom firmware to allow biometrics whenever, if you can replace the kernel, you can generally make the device behave however you'd like.