“Hey, I need to log in to the Instagram account, what’s the password?”
“Regular one, capital M, ! at the end.”
I’ve sent a text of that nature probably 500+ times during my career. I am a stereotypical millennial freelancer with a plethora of jobs, side hustles, creative projects, and collaborators. For a long time, I didn’t have a password manager. I used one of three passwords, with a variety of capitalizations, number differences, and a single symbol at the end. That changed when I heard this episode of the podcast Reply All. Gimlet Media founder Alex Blumberg found out that someone was using his Uber account in Russia, and it all stemmed from his password being breached. The podcast hosts recommended getting a password manager, so I did.
I started out on LastPass and began taking on the arduous task of cleaning up a lifetime’s worth of bad password security.
Joining Dashlane
Fast forward 2 years from that fateful podcast listening experience, and I was offered a job at Dashlane. However, outside of my career as an Executive Assistant, I have my own tech startup building an app of career management tools for professional auditioning performers, a sports journalism startup of artists writing unique perspectives on stories in the world of sports, and two production companies producing podcasts, films, albums, and more. In other words, I’ve got a lot of passwords.
Do you know what’s wild about this, though? I started securing my personal passwords the same day I installed my first password manager. But my business ones? I didn’t change any of them. It seemed too daunting to make a special password for each account I shared with other people that they would then also have to track. Oh, and don’t get me started on two-factor authentication:
“I’m logging into our [INSERT MAJOR COMPANY HERE] account, text me the code you get!”
OR
“…send me the code from the 2FA app!”
Truly didn’t seem worth it.
Unlocking our access, no matter the project
Do you know what solved this problem? Dashlane. The day I started as an EA my new boss shared a bunch of passwords with me for accounts I would need to manage. My mind was blown at how easy it was to organize and autofill these unique and complex passwords/logins inside the password manager while ensuring they stayed secure. It wasn’t long before I started applying new password safety measures to my freelance/project accounts. I hired a software development company to build an MVP, and it turned out their developers used Dashlane. Since Dashlane allows you to share passwords with limited rights, I could share my very secure password with this external contractor I didn’t yet trust, and they were still able to autofill it from their app but never see it or share it onwards.
The kicker? Dashlane has built-in 2FA that is shareable.
That’s right, no more texts from collaborators asking me for the code. I simply make an ultra-secure password using Dashlane’s generator, add 2FA using the mobile app, and share it with my colleague. It’s quick, painless, and now the account stays secure with Dashlane’s zero-knowledge architecture. This never would have been easily possible without a password manager.
Recently, I got an alert that one of my passwords was compromised in a hack. And (because I am a completionist in every video game I play) I have been working to bring my Password Health Score to a complete 100. I’m currently at 98, and the 12 reused passwords? Those are shared with me by other people. I’m working on getting them fixed inside their own Dashlane accounts to bring my score to 100%.
Password managers for the win
Having Dashlane has fundamentally made my professional life easier, more secure, and less of a point of stress in my life. As a freelancer with a myriad of projects who has nearly 500 passwords (many shared with various collaborators), I never want to go back to the way it was before. I highly recommend you let Dashlane streamline your online security as well.
Learn more about password management on our Dashlane's features page.
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