14 DAY TRIAL // Google cares about keeping its users and their accounts safe, and it would be bad for businesses not to.
The company has been leading the way in providing the tools and technologies for people to stay safe on the web, at least as far as mainstream web companies are concerned.
But two-factor authentication doesn't matter much if people don't use it, and a permanent encrypted connection in Gmail or Search is likewise useless if the account password is so weak anyone can break into it.
So Google is providing some basic – but always useful – advice on picking the right password for your account.
The advice is fairly standard, but it's worth repeating. Google's recommends, unsurprisingly, to use different passwords for different services.
At the very least you should have separate passwords for the important services like Google, Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo, and so on.
These are frequently used by other smaller sites for convenience, so if one falls, attackers could get access to dozens more sites and apps.
Of course, having a hard to guess (not by humans but by computers) password is equally important. Everyone knows not to use things like "password" or "q1w2e3r4," though plenty still do. However, even clever passwords like lyrics or long but common phrases are very easily bypassed by attackers.
The reason why most people don't use different passwords or strong ones is because they're hard to remember.
This is where password managers come in. These days, all major browsers come with good, built-in password managers that can even sync passwords between devices. There are also plenty of third-party options like LastPass or 1password.
Finally, Google stresses the importance of recovery options. If your account falls into the hands of an attacker for whatever reason, you want to be able to get it back.
