Creating a strong password and remotely tracking lost phones are 21st Century survival skills we should all have. McAfee’s LiveSafe however has arrived to make all of this easier.
LiveSafe is an all-encompassing dashboard that lets you manage passwords for multiple services like Facebook and Netflix from one place. You can also use LiveSafe to locate and lock down phones, tablets, laptops and desktop PCs remotely, as you would’ve done with McAfee’s WaveSecure. Finally, there’s a 1GB Personal Locker for you to store digital copies of sensitive documents, like your passport or flight passes, in the cloud.
Best of all, you can choose to lock access to all of this with face and voice recognition software, making tying up your sensitive details extra secure. We’ve seen a demo of this in action and bar one slight snap, it worked really well.
Gary Davis, vice president for global consumer marketing at McAfee told us that in their latest round of testing, the software failed twice in 100 attempts, which isn’t a huge error margin. Improvements on background noise filtering so that it can work in noisy environments are being worked on right now.
Davis also told us that consumers routinely complain about what he called “password fatigue,” exasperation about having to have separate passwords for various services. Davis wants biometrics to sidestep this altogether.
“You’d be hard pressed today to find a laptop or a device that doesn’t come with a camera and a microphone built in. So what we’re doing is hoping that people will get accustomed to using their face and voice to log in to the dashboard and access their services this way.”
The master-stroke of LiveSafe is that once you’ve assigned your various services (social networks, streaming sites and so on) to your LiveSafe account, you can get fast, one-click access to all of these services through the McAfee dashboard.
Better still, you can let LiveSafe automatically generate super-secure passwords for you. As people are still using insecure passwords like ‘admin,’ or four ‘1’s, letting LiveSafe generate something a bit more robust is perhaps a good idea for those who aren’t 10th Dan black belt password makers. Thanks to the one-click access, the idea is you won’t even have to remember passwords anymore.
Right now just a handful of online services can be accessed through LiveSafe but Davis said that incorporating more services in the future won’t be a problem.
LiveSafe basically acts as a security guard who recognises your face and the sound of your voice and keeps hold of the keys to your various profiles elsewhere. But how much will it cost?
LiveSafe subscriptions will start at £19.99 for the first year. Renewals will cost a bit more at £79.99 for subsequent years, but Davis also spoke of a rewards system whereby you’d be able to earn discounts off the renewal fees. There are also plans in the works for you to buy more Personal Locker space and expand that 1GB, Dropbox style.
By adding more devices and services to the LiveSafe dashboard you’d earn Foursquare-esque medals for doing specific things like uploading documents and securing a certain number of devices. The details of this are being ironed out at the moment and will be announced over the coming weeks.
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