Well, maybe not the sun, but certainly security, which is, after all, why we’re all here. Here at Vidoop we try to put personal security in the hands of the user, particularly when it comes to passwords, which can be stored either locally on your own computer or remotely with myVidoop. This choice offers a balance of security and convenience, giving you the final say over how to approach your own online security needs.

For example, by default myVidoop allows you to save website passwords on your hard drive using 256-bit AES encryption so that other people cannot easily access password save files even if they gain access to your computer. However, the other available option is one of convenience, whereby you can store your passwords online and thus have access to them anywhere. This choice can be made and changed at any time, and be different for different passwords you own.

Interestingly, one of the most challenging things we’re dealing with right now as far as user education goes is distinguishing between passwords that are stored on your local computer, compared to those that are stored on myVidoop; we’ve found this be a particularly difficult concept for people to wrap their heads around conceptually. Comparing the two options, there are certainly trade offs – offline password storage has more security but it’s a lot less convenient, and since we couldn’t really come to a conclusive decision as to whether or not the trade offs were worth it here or there, we opted to leave the decision up to the user.

Ultimately, and feel free to chime in and correct me if you believe differently, I think that most people have probably hundreds of online accounts that are all tied to the same email address, and probably are accessed using the same username and password. This works fine until someone steals one of these accounts, and while we’ve said before that no solution can stop hacking wholesale, with myVidoop you do get an added layer of security even if you decide to store all of your passwords online through Vidoop’s use of the off-band channel, which requires activation of any new computer or browser attempting to access myVidoop.

But this is not to say it’s perfect — nothing is. In truth, the weakest link in security for an individual attack is still likely to be one of social engineering, ie. figuring out a user’s image categories if you happen to know someone well enough or managing to get access to their cell phone for a few minutes out of the day. Of course, by this time, you probably have more important things to worry about.

So, that all being said, I guess the question I’d like to pose to you is this: which is more important to you, security or convenience? Here at Vidoop, we give you both.