Sharing is caring — except for those times when you’re thinking about spreading the wealth with your personal streaming and shopping account information. It may call for an uncomfortable conversation, but if you’ve been asked by friends or family members to give up the goods when it comes to your Amazon login information, you may want to think twice. On its face it would seem like sharing account passwords is a smart way to save a ton of money and still all benefit from really great Amazon content. But this risky endeavor can open the gates to plenty of problems you weren’t counting on. Here’s why experts say you should never share your Amazon account login.
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You may be thinking: what is the harm in sharing my Amazon account info so that my good friend can purchase a mascara that will be delivered to her home in a day? It may seem like nothing more than a nice thing to do. But sharing your account info with anyone, even a trusted companion, can lead to many problems, says Jan Chapman, Tech Expert, Co-Founder and Managing director of a full suite of I.T. services company MSP Blueshift. “It not only means access to the services provided by amazon, but also the authority to use your name and other details,” Chapman says.
Most users have their payment details saved on their Amazon accounts to avoid entering them repeatedly when making a purchase, Chapman reminds us. This is hugely problematic if you’re planning on splitting your Amazon account with anyone else. “When you share your Amazon account with someone else, you give them full access to use your payment details and make purchases as they wish,” Chapman says. “They can eventually lock you out of the account and maintain full access to it. By the time you are able to recover the account, or you ask your bank to stop the payments, some of the purchases would have already been paid for. Therefore, it is a huge risk to trust anyone with your Amazon account details.”
You may be thinking: but my friend or family member would NEVER do that to me — they would never betray my trust like that. Fair enough. But there’s another potential problem to consider, says Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-founder of Keeper Security: the way you are sharing password information can leave you wide open to hackers.
“You might have the strongest password in the world, but if you share it with someone who stores it in an email account protected by ‘qwerty,’ it won’t make a difference,” Lurey says. “In a study that we conducted around work-related passwords, we found that 62% of U.S. employees have shared a work-related password over an unencrypted text message or email, which could be intercepted by cybercriminals in transit. If your Amazon account’s password gets intercepted by the same tactics, then a cybercriminal can have access to your credit card, your purchase history, personal information, and any account that is attached to your Amazon.com account. Not only that, but if that account has the same password as any other account that you may own, then those accounts have also been compromised. Sharing your passwords provides more risks than rewards, if not done securely.”
In other words: the best thing to do is simply not share your Amazon account login information. But if your mind is made up about sharing it with a close friend or relative you trust, it’s far less risky to convey password information in person or over the phone that it is to send that info via email or DM’s.
