Ask HN: Google SSO or Password Manager?

Don't rely on Google. The company has proven to be unreliable again and again, and their interests (as an advertising company) cannot align with yours, as a user and a citizen.

I advise to

- get your own domain for cheap. I have .contact for a few $ and I'm happy with it.

- find a trusted email service provider (e.g Fastmail) to host your emails. This allows you to change providers at any time, without the need to inform all your contacts. I just switched from Protonmail to Fastmail and the move took me a minute or two, and I had to do nothing except change the domain configuration and use the Import tool to transfer the messages, calendars and contacts.

- Choose a good open-source synchronizing tool such as Syncthing (fabulous!) and if non suits your needs, fall back onto a reliable cloud service (e.g Dropbox).

- Pick a good, open-source password manager (I use KeePassXC) and sync it across your devices with the tool you just chose. Syncthing is perfect for me because KeePassXC can easily merge any conflict in a single click and I have all my databases available on my devices. You can save them in separate folder if you don't want to have your passwords available on, say, your personal and work devices. Tip: KeePassXC can open and unlock multiple databases at once: https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide.html#_automat...

The benefit of a password manager is that you can

- track all your account in one place, e.g which address is associated with which service

- audit your passwords (strength, uniqueness…)

- review each entries history (revert to old password, recall old logins…)

- store data related to your accounts (member ID, personal notes…)

- attach files (I'm saving some QR code in my databases, for loyalty card for instance)

- keep misc confidential info such as digicodes, credit card details, Wifi passwords…

I don't know any of my passwords except those of my devices and of my passwords databases. I let the manager generate them for me and make sure I have multiple backups of my databases.

I also use andOTP for 2FA codes, to separate them from the passwords. But andOTP support auto backups so I can quickly restore everything if I ever lose my smartphone (backup secured with OpenPGP, whose password is stored in KeepassXC of course).

I've heard good stuff from ProtonMail. It also adds a lot of security to email, if this of concern to you.

I had a similar scenario happen, where my domain expired without me realizing and my incoming emails slowed down as DNS caches expired. I finally realized it after a few days when I hadn't received an email that I was expecting, and once I renewed the domain I got a flood of emails that I had missed.

After that, I was much more careful about where my domain registration emails go.

You should use email and password stored in a password manager. If you put all your eggs in google don't be surprised when they delete your gmail account for no reason with no support for you to get it back.

> there is the infrequent, but apparently very real risk of Google locking your account

Or the very real scenario where you've been using a free Google Workspace account (is that what it's called these days) with a custom domain, and suddenly Google wants to start charging you for it. Meanwhile you've "logged in with Google" using that account across many, many sites and Google hasn't offered anyway to migrate away from that. So you either pay up or lose access to any of those accounts.