Feature Requests: Tag enhancements

WhamboMPS

I use 1Password in a family setting (me, Ted, and my wife Julie) across both Windows and Macs, and iOS devices. Like what I have seen in other households, my wife and I approach computing quite differently. One member is the geeky one (that would be me in this case!), willing to research solutions, write long forum posts, test drive alternatives, etc. The other one "Just wants it to work." Because I am concerned in general about account security I have asked my wife to use long, inscrutable passwords that vary from one site to the next. She understands -- and even agrees -- with the rationale for this need but will never really like it. She just wants things to work.

Between my wife and I we have websites (and authentication information) that I need to access, ones that she needs to access, and ones that both of us need to access. A foldering approach (e.g. folders labeled Geek, Luddite, Both) is clumsy because it means that neither one of us can store all of our credentials in one location; a multi-vault approach would presumably be even worse. What we really need is "metadata" about a set of credentials that we can use to filter on. This, at its core, is what "Tags" are. But I don't seem to be able to do what I want to do with the current tag functionality in 1Password, at least not in the Windows version of 1Password mated to the Chrome browser (which is where I am doing most of my research).

Fundamentally my belief is that users will do batch clean-up and assessment in the fat-client "application" and indeed there are some handy tools in the 1Password tool such as the "Duplicated Passwords" section. Most of the day-to-day use of the product, however, will be via the browser add-ons, both for accessing existing credential sets and for creating new ones. And this portion of the product could, in my opinion use some tweaking.

Here would be my list of desired add-ons to the product:

• Expose a field in the browser's "1Password Auto-Save" dialog box that allows for one of more tags to be assigned whenever an Auto-Save is executed. Today you can assign the folder but, somewhat surprisingly, no field exists to assign a tag (at least not in the Windows Chrome version).

Extra credit:

• Allow, as an option, the user to limit the usable tags to a list they previously created as a general preference item. For this feature at least I only want two tags that identify who in my family would want to use the credentials, "Ted" and "Julie". For credentials that we both might needs, say to our shared bank account, we would not use a "Both" tag but instead would assign two tags. Enforcing the use of only predefined tags at Auto-Save obviously would need to be an optional setting controlled in preferences since other users would want to use tags in a different manner.
• In the Auto-Save dialog box list all available tags as checkbox entries. This is most beneficial if there is the predefined list approach from the previous bullet point.
• All the user to -- by default -- filter visibility of individual 1Password entries in the browser add-on to those that match one or more specific tags. The real benefit of this is, for example, that if I have an account at Yahoo!, and my wife has an unrelated account at Yahoo!, each of us will only see one choice (the right choice) on our respective computers when we each go to login to this site.

These extra credit requests are designed to streamline the use of the shared pool of credentials that inherent in a multi-user, shared vault scenario. In my case this would spare my technophone wife from having to wade through the ~300 credentials that I have (and that I need) so that she can get to the smaller pool of credentials that she cares about. For the all-important "spousal acceptance factor" this is a good thing!

Extra, EXTRA credit!

• Instead of using "tags" for the functionality defined above, create an orthogonal concept of "Family Member". Just as folders and tags are unrelated concepts today, Family Member would be a third concept. If you go this route then you could conceivably move to not all users having all access to all credentials (as described in the "Sharing a vault" section of the user manual). In this scenario all family members could access a shared vault, but only family members assigned to a specific credential could decrypt it. This might be overkill but if you go this route you might have the makings of a platform for much larger groups than just families. One real benefit would be that if tags are inclusive of family members in one pool you could have to many entries to make showing all of them practicable in the Auto-Save dialog box, a real useful feature.

So that's it from rainy Seattle! Hope these ideas resonate with you guys.

Ted

DBrown

Thanks for letting us know how you'd like to use tags, Ted!