PayPal chief says his staff should remember their PayPal passwords. I say he’s wrong

David Marcus, the President of PayPal, is upset with staff at the company’s San Jose headquarters.

As VentureBeat reports, he chastised workers in an internal email, telling them to leave the company if they weren’t prepared to install the PayPal smartphone app.

And, he said, you can clear off if you can’t remember your PayPal password as well.

Here is part of what he wrote:

In closing, if you are one of the folks who refused to install the PayPal app or if you can’t remember your PayPal password, do yourself a favor, go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere. A life devoid of purpose, and passion in what you do everyday is a waste of the precious time you have on this earth to make it better.

Hang on a minute Dave.

Isn’t not knowing your password actually a *good* thing?

If you know your password, chances are that you’ve chosen an easy-to-remember password. Or you’re using the very same password in multiple places.

A much more sensible and safer approach would be to use unique passwords for every single account you use. That way, if your email password gets phished there is no danger that the bad guys will use those credentials to access, say, your PayPal account.

Indeed, I would go further and recommend that every password you use should not only be unique but be a complicated, hard-to-remember sequence of characters and numbers (or a gibberish phrase) that is never going to be guessed and would be arduous for even the most dedicated hacker to crack.

Of course, people don’t need to remember their passwords if they are using decent password management software – which can store their passwords securely, and generate a new, random, complicated password everytime they need one.

I, for one, have no idea what my passwords are for Amazon, PayPal, email, Twitter, the list goes on…

David – if you *know* your password rather than having a password management program to do that for you, I’m kind of worried.

If you do make the mistake of reusing passwords, you are running the risk of having your password compromised in one place (perhaps via a phishing attack or key logger) and then hackers using it to unlock your other online accounts.

Maybe it’s time to try out some password management software like Bitwarden, 1Password, and KeePass to make your passwords both safer and easier to remember.

Poor old David Marcus hasn’t been having a great week.

On Monday he tweeted that his credit card got skimmed during a visit to the UK.

Lets hope things get better for him soon, and that he realises forgetting his PayPal password might actually be a good thing.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.