Clipperz Updating with Greater Accessibility

I reviewed Clipperz a few months back and was happy to hear that there have been several updates to the service that make it more accessible for a larger audience.

Since my initial review, Clipperz has added language support created by dedicated Clipperz users in Portuguese and Japanese, added support for Internet Explorer and Opera browsers, released a scaled-down version called Clipperz Compact that works with Firefox and Opera to allow direct login to sites from the sidebar, and introduced card templates that allow easier input of data using pre-defined information.

I'm impressed with the amount of progress the app has made in the past few months, and they are definitely keeping to their commitment of providing security through transparency, offering their Crypto Library to other developers under a BSD license.

However, I still can't claim to be completely sold on the app. I may just be old-fashioned, but I'm still reluctant to commit all my information to one place. While I may use an app for online password storage, I keep my financial data in another place, and personal information (like my SSN as well as those for my kids) in a third location. I've read the security documentation, including the posts on the Clipperz blog regarding AES security, but I'm just unwilling to put all my eggs in one basket, no matter how much easier it could make my day-to-day activities.

I also think that Clipperz has more to do when it comes to making use of the app more user-friendly. Whenever you log into the site, you download a fair-sized Javascript app. To verify that nothing has been tampered with, you have to verify the checksums. While that may seem like a no-brainer for a tech-savvy individual, it's still a fairly limited user-base who would even understand this paragraph, much less be willing and able to complete that verification. The Clipperz way might be more secure, but it's not as user-friendly as the check done by PassPack, where you customize your verification page, matching it to your entry. It's the small details like this that can make or break adoption of an app over another.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on the continued development of Clipperz to see what's coming next.