Do not share your Gmail and Twitter passwords!

If you were in a coffee shop and a stranger walked up to you and asked you for your login name and password for any web site you use, would you tell him? So why do people repeatedly get tricked into entering their Twitter and Gmail credentials on the latest fad site of the day?

Yesterday, almost everyone on Twitter was playing with TwitterRank, it’s currently down, and there are lots of allegations being thrown around that it might be a scam. This isn’t the first time and certainly won’t be the last time that something like this happened.

No matter how legit a web site should look or even might be, you shouldn’t ever share your login credentials with it in order to grab your contacts and add friends or for any other reason! Most sites have APIs to access this information so that they can fetch this data with your authorization but you won’t have to share your password with them. Yes, Google is lagging behind and hasn’t added this to Gmail yet but it’s still no reason for you to be stupid and hand out that password to any site that asks.

If you’re going to be this silly why not just put your login credentials on a post it note and stick it to your forehead! Everyone repeat after me. NEVER share your passwords!