Passworthy

Creating online accounts and the secure passwords to protect them, has become an integral part of everyday life. Each time we create a user account, we place our trust in a company’s security protocols to protect the username, password and other personal data required to create the account. But there is no legal standard, so the quality of protection varies from company to company. Al Jazeera contacted over 40 companies from a variety of industries to find out how they store passwords.Then we built a Chrome browser extension that aims to help you understand the security practices for some of the biggest service providers in the U.S. Update 4/10/14: Passworthy now includes the 10,000 most-used websites and shows whether they are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug. For more information and a list of supported sites, read our article on password storage on Al Jazeera America at http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2013/11/onlineservices-password-storage.html and Heartbleed at http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/10/heartbleed-band-aid. Please note that companies may change their security measures over time. We will seek to update Passworthy accordingly as this information becomes available to us.