Americans and Their Passwords: It's Complicated!

Aside from presenting its big push into AI, Apple also unveiled a new Passwords app as part of its upcoming software releases. Built on the foundation of Keychain, the new app will enable users to store and access passwords, passkeys and other login credentials across Apple devices and on Windows PCs, helping them manage the multitude of logins that our digital lives require.

With the new tool, Apple is addressing a problem that many people have these days, as they’re forced to perform a balancing act between picking passwords that are safe and still somehow easy enough to remember. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 69 percent of U.S. adults feel overwhelmed by the numbers of passwords they have to keep track of, and 41 percent always or often write down their passwords – a practice that is not recommended by security experts.

Password managers such as Apple’s new app can help address this problem, but so far they’re not so far spread. According to Pew’s findings, just 32 percent of respondents used a password manager at the time of the survey in May 2023, up from 20 percent in 2019.