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Like British Gas before them, Equifax clearly doesn’t want you to use a password manager to store your passwords.

What other explanation can there be for the credit rating company to frustrate any attempts to paste passwords (into its online form by instantly blanking them out again?

It’s all very well for the Equifax website to ask you to choose a password that is up to 20 characters long (why the upper limit by the way?), and consisting of both numbers and letters, but wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t discouraging the use of password managers like LastPass and 1Password through the company’s bizarre dislike of pasting a hard-to-crack, hard-to-remember password into the form’s field?

(Sorry, that was a long sentence. But this kind of dumb behaviour by websites is exasperating.)

Reader Clive Moon was similarly concerned, and dropped me a note tipping me off to the problem:

Wanted to check my credit score with Equifax, and the sign-in process requires a password. I always use the KeePass generator, but Equifax wouldn’t let me paste into the web form, using IE 11. (I usually use Firefox, but the site hardly worked at all in Firefox). So, I ended up typing a 20 character password, with mixed case and numbers. Twice.

Come on Equifax, sort it out. Security-minded users want to have complex, hard-to-crack, unique passwords. And they want to be able to paste in those passwords rather than fumble around typing them in character by character.

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