Confirm Strategy for Helping Friend

bwofford
bwofford
Community Member

This is a request for guidance. My wife and I have a friend that relies on me for help with all forms of tech, which includes managing passwords. She will never embrace using a password manager though I have convinced her it's time to abandon storing this information in Contact records on her iPhone. She will insist that she has read-only access to eliminate any possibility that she could inadvertently corrupt or delete records. In general, little by little my wife is helping our friend achieve better time management by performing more tasks online. You get the gist.

For the past decade or so, I have been adding any of our friend's login credentials as records in the 1P subscription that my wife and I share, using tags for identification. What I think makes sense is to move her records to a new account that I would add to our subscription. I would then grant our friend access to just that account. I would probably limit this to using the app on her iPhone, as she struggles mightily with her Windows laptop!

Here's my question. I presume I will have to enter our Master Password on her iPhone to give her any access to anything. Does this increase our vulnerability in any way? Additionally, since all of us are in our early 70s, I must think about mortality. As we lock down more and more access to her important information (she has significant assets), we need to anticipate the proper and legal transition of this data to her designated subordinates and/or power-of-attorney.

In that strict sense, I'd want our friend to be your customer of record, completely separate from my wife and me. I've read that you currently don't support transfer of records between subscriptions. If we go the route of a standalone subscription, what would be the easiest way for me to manage her passwords without disrupting my own workflow that heavily relies on 1Password?

Many thanks in advance.

Comments

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @bwofford!

    Here's my question. I presume I will have to enter our Master Password on her iPhone to give her any access to anything.

    You don't need to give her your Master Password: if you invite her to your account, she will have her own.

    Add and remove family members

    Alternatively, you could also think about giving her guest access to your account:

    Share with guests in 1Password Families

    If we go the route of a standalone subscription, what would be the easiest way for me to manage her passwords without disrupting my own workflow that heavily relies on 1Password?

    If you want her to have her own separate account, and you still want to manage it for her, the 1Password app supports multiple accounts, so that could work for you too:

    How to use multiple accounts

    You can just add her account to your 1Password app and you will be able to manage both :+1:

  • bwofford
    bwofford
    Community Member

    Allow me to explain my confusion about accounts. Your tutorial video included just one example of using multiple accounts: one account containing vaults for personal items and another account with vaults for work-related items for sharing with a team. The instruction for adding this new work-related account prompts entering the same master password. Thus, in this context, it appeared to me the term "account" was merely a folder for organizing vaults.

    The clarification I am seeking is to know that your sole use of the term account means what I would have believed it to be, which is everything associated with my annual subscription as a customer. If this is so, I will, then, proceed with creating a new paid, standalone subscription for my friend using her payment method to establish her as your customer of record. Then, from this newly-created account, I will invite myself as a share with the expectation that I can support her via my apps without interrupting my own 1P workflow.

    What your response didn't address is the practical example of my use case. At some point, it will no longer be necessary for a link to exist between our families. As per recommendation by 1P, my wife and I have placed the form with our Master Password and Secret Key in a secure location. Our children will have access to this at the appropriate time. I will print the same form for our friend to secure for her children but I'd also want to include the instruction they would logically anticipate for removing the share to me.

    I am a committed user of your product and I have high regard for your company. I would like to encourage you improve your effort with videos and/or other collateral to promote use cases or best practices.

  • bwofford
    bwofford
    Community Member

    As a former business trainer, I recall the statistic that most people are kinaesthetic learners, and I clearly fall into this category. I needed a legitimate reason to expand my knowledge of 1Password functionality by introducing a second account for a friend who will rely on me to manage her passwords. Up until now, her passwords were merely tagged in the single account my wife and I share. After spending several hours this past weekend, my main takeaway is the realization that representations including accounts, vaults, categories and tags are essentially markers for viewing the individual records.

    The best example of this discovery was looking at contents of the Private vault. Whereas I had previously thought of a vault as a folder within an account, I was confused that viewing the contents of this vault depended on which account I was signed into. That was counterintuitive to my thinking of the vault as a folder, which I now realize is grossly oversimplified!

    Beyond learning by doing, I also benefit from visuals. Perhaps I missed it while looking through your collateral but a block diagram of how these viewing components relate would significantly enhance my leverage of the power and flexibility of your database. The only use case mentioned in your existing video for adding another account is the home and work scenario. As I mentioned earlier, entering my existing Master Password into a newly-created account seemed counterintuitive to the notion of maintaining separate passwords.

    If this feedback is not reaching the appropriate audience, would you kindly move it to a different place? I have seen as many topics addressed from a marketing or philosophical point of view as I have seen interactions on specific technical issues. Many thanks.

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    @bwofford:

    If this is so, I will, then, proceed with creating a new paid, standalone subscription for my friend using her payment method to establish her as your customer of record. Then, from this newly-created account, I will invite myself as a share with the expectation that I can support her via my apps without interrupting my own 1P workflow.

    This sounds indeed like the best option for what you are trying to do :+1:

    At some point, it will no longer be necessary for a link to exist between our families.

    When this will happen, you can just remove your user from her account:

    Remove family members

    I am a committed user of your product and I have high regard for your company. I would like to encourage you improve your effort with videos and/or other collateral to promote use cases or best practices.

    Thank you for your feedback! I will make sure I share it with our documentation team for consideration, they are always looking at ways to improve our resources :+1:

This discussion has been closed.