Google Chrome will soon allow you to securely share passwords with family members
We’ve been treated to a new Chrome leak that shows exactly how a previously leaked feature – the option to share your passwords with other Chrome users – will work.
This again comes from a font with a lot of browser related knowledge on X (formerly Twitter), Leopeva64.
Earlier, Leopeva64 discovered the ability to share passwords on Chrome’s password manager page (during testing at the end of June), and now they’ve figured out how this works.
If you don’t have a family group, the dialog will inform you that it is (for now) only possible to share passwords with members of those groups, and there will be a link to the website where you can create the family group.August 30, 2023
You can click and share passwords (the passwords you’ve saved in Chrome), but apparently only with those who are members of a Google “family group.”
If you have not already set up a family group, you will be prompted to do so when you try to use this feature.
So your next question is probably what is a family group?
Well, the name gives it away: it’s a small group – of a maximum of six – of family members with whom you can easily share things from the Google ecosystem. (With those shareable elements consisting of passwords, as noted – plus the family group also facilitates functionality such as setting ground rules for what your kids can do online).
Analysis: There is still a way to go
This is a pretty useful feature in theory, but keep in mind that it’s still in development for Google’s Chrome browser. As evidenced by the tweet above, it still doesn’t work, even though the foundations of password sharing have been laid. An error message ‘something went wrong’ appears when you try to use it.
When it finally works and rolls out to the finished version of the Chrome browser, it will be a useful tool if you need to give another family member access to one of your online accounts for any reason. It makes this a seamless and more secure process – well, definitely more secure than, say, writing your credentials on a post-it note for that person.
Of course, Google is always adding new features to Chrome, but we’ve seen a flurry of activity for the browser recently. That includes the addition of further security measures around Chrome extensions and a refresh on mobile to boost your search power, not to mention the possibility of in-line previews for web page links that could revolutionize browsing.
All of this is part of the drive to keep Chrome as the best all-in-one offering as it ranks in our roundup of the best web browsers.