1Password 8 Printing

@tsee

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! One of the problems with printing your passwords is something called "versioning". Sure, you could print all of the items in your vault and then, momentarily, have a perfect copy. But the copy would only remain a perfect copy until you changed one of your items. And then you'd need to update just that one item in your printed copy since you probably don't want to print dozens or hundreds of pages when you change just one item. In my experience, maintaining a printed copy of items can get unwieldy very quickly. What if you update a username for a website while you're on vacation and away from your printed copy? You might forget to update the printed copy when you return because of the stress associated with travel. Or what if a family member changes something in an item that is in a shared vault without telling you? Suddenly your printed copy is outdated and you won't even know it.

That being said, there are ways around this problem. For example, 1Password could set a tag letting you know that an item was updated and then the tag could be automatically removed when you print that item. That is definitely something that has been suggested to the team before.

When it comes to the risks of printing your items there are a couple big ones that I can detail off the top of my head:

1. When items are stored in 1Password they're protected by our end-to-end encryption. The only way to unlock 1Password and see your items is by using your account password and Secret Key. A printed copy of your items is no longer protected by that encryption but is available plain text to anyone who might stumble across it.
2. Even when the 1Password app is unlocked 1Password still has other systems that continue to protect your data. For example, on the Mac we invoke a macOS security feature called Secure Input when you edit an item to make sure that what you type into 1Password won't be intercepted by other applications or keyloggers. When you print items our security processes are no longer involved and your data goes through your system unencrypted and unprotected by 1Password. This means that not only does your printer have access to your items, but so does the printer's driver, the communications method between your computer and the printer, and any apps or appliances on your device, the printer, or the network, that might be snooping along the way.

Are you trying to make your items available to someone else in the case of an emergency? Or are you concerned about something happening to 1Password and you'd like to have a backup of your data just in case?

-Dave