GMail Account = OpenID. Good News! Or is it……

As an avid user of Google services, I’ve always found my GMail account to be very handy.

If you’re like me and use Gmail first thing in the morning and more or less last thing before bedtime, you’ll come to realise that it’s hard to forget the password.

Yesterday night I signed up for Nuconomy Insights, a new analytics package with a pretty fantastic wordpress plugin. When I registered, I was given a password with a randomly generated string something like &*(69789yiuh#. That would clearly be the most secure sort of password, but it’s not the sort of password you can generate for each and every site you register to and try and remember.

This morning as I went through all my social media sites, I realised that more often than not, I use simple passwords that I can remember. This of course is for the sake of convenience, but then there are also possibly security implications.

I’ve had trouble in the past signing in to my Flickr account (actually it happened to me again this morning), probably due to a problem on their end, but when that happened to me I was quite sure that my account was compromised. At the start I was told I couldn’t sign in, which over time let me sign in, but redirected me to the Yahoo.com.au page, and slowly progressed to allow me to get into my Flickr account.

Sure it’s just Flickr, but my blood ran a little cold, because my Flickr account is full of stuff collected of a few years.

Coming across the news that my GMail account has suddenly become more than just a GMail account got me thinking: While it’s convenient to have one ID to rule them all, sometimes the price to pay for such convenience is vigilance.

In the past, it was secure enough to have various passwords for various websites, but with one superkey, the compartmentalised nature of websites is slowly being broken down. If and when someone gets hold of your passwords, that could mean the compromise of more than one of your online services.

I’m going to change my GMail password today.

News via Techcrunch