This New Google Tool Warns You If Your Passwords Were Stolen in a Data Breach

Gone are the days when scribbling a username-and-password combo or two on a sticky note was enough to keep track of all the logins you need to use on a regular basis.

Nowadays, we use countless passwords online to do everything from buy groceries to access health insurance claims. But how do you know if your login credentials have been compromised in a data breach? In short, you don't. But Google is now taking an important step to empower consumers to keep their login info safe with the launch of Password Checkup. The new Chrome web broswer extension works to see if any of your accounts were affected by data breaches.

As Google puts it in a recent blog post, "We want to help you stay safe not just on Google, but elsewhere on the web as well. This is where the new Password Checkup Chrome extension can help. Whenever you sign in to a site, Password Checkup will trigger a warning if the username and password you use is one of over 4 billion credentials that Google knows to be unsafe." If you get an alert that one of your passwords was in a data breach known to Google, you can reset that password, and any others where you use that same username-and-password combination.

The Chrome extension was created in collaboration with Stanford University cryptography experts. In its blog post, Google also stresses that it's taking steps to keep your personal data secure and that the tool was designed with "privacy-preserving technologies to never reveal this personal information to Google."

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Well, time to go ahead and download the Password Checkup extension. And to think half our loved ones thought that we weren't tech savvy. Ha.