Most of today’s web browsers offer the ability to “remember” passwords and usernames for websites. This is very convenient.

It’s also a horrible idea, at least without a good plan for response if the computer is stolen. Another laptop is stolen every 12 seconds. Imagine writing your name and address on your keychain, which has your car keys and your house keys, and then leaving those keys in the parking lot. (This actually happened on an episode of “Perfect Strangers” once–not sure why that sticks in my mind so much).

This week’s tip centers on some helpful amnesia.

We all know that it’s a pain to have to remember 500 different website usernames and 500 associated passwords. And, there are definitely many tools out there, both software-based password storage systems as well as services such as OpenID, to help the problem. But I’m not focusing on those for right now. Maybe I’ll do a blog post about those some day.

The simple fact is that most people:

1) Let their browser remember all their passwords, and/or click the “remember me” box so that login isn’t even required.

2) Choose the same username and password for almost all their sites.

3) Choose a horribly insecure password.

Given that this is simply true, regardless of whether or not it should be, one very basic first step to laptop security is to STOP allowing your browser to remember passwords.

With MyLaptopGPS, we can actually delete those saved passwords if they fall into a thief’s hands. But why tempt fate?

If you absolutely must let your browser store some passwords, do it on your desktop PC, which is still a big risk. But don’t do it on your laptop.