Hemigal sent me a good question this week dealing with usernames and passwords.  I was really surprised that this is the first time I have received a question regarding this since it is something that may affect all of us from time-to-time.

She said, “I accidentally entered the wrong password for a site and my browser asked if I wanted to save the username and password.”  She went on to ask, “After I saved them I realized that it was the wrong password but now when I return to the site and put in the username it automatically fills in the wrong password…what should I do now?”

This happens to me often.  If your usernames and passwords are not being saved in MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / CONTENT then choose AutoComplete Settings and check the correct boxes to activate this feature.  For Firefox use TOOLS / OPTIONS / SECURITY and under Passwords check, “Remember passwords for sites”.  For other browsers just poke around under Tools and you will find it.  If not contact the browser’s manufacturer and ask them.

What happens at a site when you have a saved username and password, is that you can click in the empty textbox and your username will be prefilled along with your password.  This is a very convenient feature although not that secure when someone else uses your computer.  Note that most financial sites will not allow your username and password to be saved as a security precaution.  This is a very good thing.

If you save the wrong password how do you correct it?  There are several ways this may be solved.  Microsoft Internet Explorer’s (MSIE) and Firefox’s (FF) solutions are similar.

The first I suggest is to click in the textbox and the saved username will appear.  Now highlight the username with your mouse and then press the delete key on your keyboard.  That should take care of it and when you retype the username you will be asked to save it again.  In FF you don’t really have to do that, just retype a new password over the old one and it will ask you if you wish to save the new password.  It should work like that in MSIE too, but not often for me.

A more aggressive way to correct this is to delete all of your saved usernames and passwords.  For MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / GENERAL under “Browser History”, click the Delete button and finally click on the Passwords button.  For FF use TOOLS / OPTIONS / PRIVACY then under “Private Data” click “Clear Now” and check “Saved Passwords” and “Clear private data now”.

There are, as always, other ways to perform this same task but these are two of the more common ways.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 5:34 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.