Early in the morning and I've already got something to go off about. There's no trickery involved with the title of this one. It has to do with password resets and how I hate the way things are handled to make your account "safe" from hackers.
Let me begin with complaining about frequency of changes. If you aren't dealing with passwords, you aren't reading this. They are a part of life in this day and age. In your personal life, you likely never have to change your passwords unless you want to or the company you deal with detects some issues and requires you to change it. But when you get to work, it's a different story. Where I work, I have 7 different pieces of software that each have their own username and password. Granted, many of the usernames are the same and they don't change, but the passwords are the real issue. Each one of these has a policy that the password expires after x days, and guess what, they are all different! How are we supposed to be able to remember all of these? Go ahead, say that you can use a password manager. Well you can if you have a personal smart phone that you don't mind storing that information on (as I do) but likely your company won't allow any software that isn't approved. And usually, approved means purchased. And more than likely, they will tell you they don't have the money in the budget for it. So what about open source stuff that's free? That's what I use (I'll put a link below) but most companies don't trust anything that isn't paid for. And I don't get that but whatever, if they want to waste money I guess it's there problem.
But now, let's talk about those mandatory changes pushed by the stuff you use in your personal life. Today, for me, it's Twitter. I haven't used it in a long time because it's a real pain in the rear to follow a conversation. I've left it there thinking that at some point I will go back and give it another whirl but, as you might guess by this, that ain't happening. I finally decided that I wasn't going to go back so I'd just close the account in the stupid email that I get daily. Open it up, log in and I get a message stating that they've detected strange activity with my account and that I need to reset the password. My first thought was, why didn't I get an email about this? Seems pretty stupid to me that they send me crap email daily but they couldn't be bothered to send me one stating that something odd was happening with my account. So I followed the instructions to reset the password, waited for the email from them with the stupid link to reset the thing, clicked it, and finally changed the password. When I clicked the OK button after that, I got a blank page. That's correct, the browser tab was empty! No links, nothing happened when you refreshed, nada! So I went to the Twitter home page to log in to close the account. Logged in with my new password and guess what, that's right, same message! So I was giving them the benefit of the doubt on this thinking that I set the password to the same as it was before and followed the process all over again. This time I know it was different as I wasn't sure of the password the first time I logged in. Went to the home page and logged in with the new password and got the same stupid message again. Now I'm annoyed! I changed it to some explicit language so I know it's not the same. And again, the same thing. Now this is likely to push me to send a message to them telling them where they can shove their "service" because I'm never going to open their crap again.
So what about the other piece of the title, account closing? Well, the above is part of it. I can't log in so I'm going to have to waste my time and theirs with an email. But that isn't all of it. Some of you who follow me (or my wife) on Google+ know that we've been looking for a new house. In the process of doing so, we've used a couple of apps to help. I went to close the account on one of them (Zillow is all I tried) today and couldn't find how to do it. Decided to search their help section and all it would tell me is how to save a search or save a house as a favorite. Why is it that they make it so difficult to do this? Searching for a house isn't something that you do every other month! I wouldn't have signed up for an account except it was the easiest way to show my wife houses that I thought we might want to look at. These companies are going overboard with you needing an account so that they can track your habits and sell that data to advertising agencies.
At any rate, to solve some of the above issues, I suggest that everyone use a password manager as it makes life much simpler. You will only need to memorize 1 master password/phrase to decrypt your database of account names and associated passwords. There are many of them out there on the market, some of which cost money, some of which are free. I use KeePass Password Manager (found here) for a couple of reasons. First, is that it's free. Some might worry about that because it's open source and they worry about that. There is no reason in the world to think that open source relates to higher risk of malicious software. There are just as many people writing malicious programs for paid software as there are people doing it as open source. Get over it! The second reason I use it is that it offers a password generator. This means that I don't need to think of a password for an account, I can have the software generate one for me of the length necessary and it won't be associated with a birthday or anniversary of some sort (what most people use for passwords). And you don't have to worry about remembering what that password is, once you open the program, you can copy the password and paste it where you need it. The next reason I use it is because it's available for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android (the one I use on the Play Store). I'm not sure about iOS as I don't have a device that uses it, but I believe it is. And the last reason I use it, I can store the database in the cloud. This means that I can add a new account with the password on any of my devices and have it available to all of them within seconds. It's made life much easier.
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