Early access and Alfred / Spotlight / LaunchBar (3rd party search integration)

what is the security issue and was it present in 1PW 7 and earlier

There wasn't a security issue per se, but rather the approach taken in earlier versions of 1Password weren't ideal. To allow for the integration we needed to write out plain text files (unencrypted) with the following metadata of each of your items:

• title
• description
• URLs
• vault name
• item category
• account name
• vault identifier
• item identifier

This wasn't ideal for privacy and it also added another set of files that needed to be kept in sync. These reasons prompted us to hide this option in the Advanced section of Preferences and to default it to off.

When we went back to the drawing board in 1Password 8 we recreated everything to take performance and privacy to new levels and bringing this option forward didn't align with those goals.

Thankfully the 1Password CLI is now available and as we've seen Alfred has already started to use it. With that said, this is still the beginning and there's more we need to do with the CLI to make integration easier and more performant. For example, automatically bundling the CLI with 1Password (or having a button to install it) would be great.

Sorry for the bumpy ride everybody. And thank you for trying things out and sharing your experiences. 🤗

++dave;
1Password Founder