We trust cloud services to keep our data secure. But we don’t always think about the impact in the event where the service would have some downtime. Even less in a situation where the provider would decide to disable the service. Well, I had the last situation with one provider, Keeper Security.
Context
All started in June 2017 when I subscribed to a 14-day trial period for the business edition. There is a sale representative who reached out to me toward the end of the trial period. He extended the trial period for 1 year; thus, until June 2018. It was a great offer and did enjoy the service for 11 months. In May 2018, someone from Keeper Security called me and left a message on my voicemail. He said something about the trial period that would expire soon. He was also not so sure why I got that 1-year trial period to start with. He was not able to confirm since the previous sale representative left the company. But he also confirmed that the trial period would expire only in a few weeks and to call him back.
Up to now, everything is good. I was planning to subscribe to the service and obviously to pay for it.
What happens?
Back home, a few hours later, I am ready to purchase a subscription and I login on my account… Then, I receive the error message “This account is expired”! The worst part is that it is not even possible to make a purchase or export the data when the account is not active. I had all my passwords lock in the vault without any warnings for a few hours. It was not even possible to unlock the vault through the browser extensions where I thought my passwords were saved on the local drive. The support team was at least able to quickly reactivate my account for a few days. But it was still a few hours where I thought I had to reset all my passwords.
Finally
As soon as I got access again to my account, I simply exported all my data. And, unfortunately, definitely closed my account with Keeper Security. Even if they have an interesting service, I can’t trust them anymore. This is not a situation directly targeted to this company. However, it did make me think twice about how I use some cloud services. It took me a very long time before trusting a cloud password manager.
I usually have a data export with my most important cloud services but it was not the case with this one. Back to the “old school” way. I have a local software password manager installed on my laptop with my data. KeePassXC, a fork of KeePassX from the well-known KeePass…