The Cloaked browser extension watches your online activity and offers help when you need to enter a new (or existing) cloaked email. That same extension handles Cloaked’s password management features, offering full access to the login credentials you’ve saved.
Import Passwords to Start
If you’re a regular PCMag reader, you probably already have a password manager. Even if you don’t use a third-party password manager, you may have accepted your browser’s offer to save passwords for you. There are various strategies for switching to a new password manager, but the easiest way is to import from your existing collection.
(Credit: Cloaked/PCMag)
Cloaked can import from Brave, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, as well as from Apple Keychain. Its list of competitors supported for import is rather short: 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Keeper, and LastPass. Bitwarden, by contrast, imports from almost 50 competing password managers.
In testing, I found that importing from Keeper has improved since my last review, though it’s still a minor challenge. I exported my Keeper data as instructed and tried powering through the import process. Given that Keeper is listed as a supported source, I figured it should just work. I was wrong. First, Cloaked treated the first line of data as column headings. I edited the CSV file to add an actual headings row and tried again.
This time, Cloaked correctly matched the title, username, password, and URL fields. It did nothing with the Folder field from Keeper, but then, Cloaked doesn’t use folders as such. When last tested, the presence or absence of a value in the Folder field screwed up the alignment of the remaining fields, so this is a big improvement.
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There was one more minor problem. Almost a third of the imported entries came through marked “Needs Review.” A little study revealed that almost all of these had usernames that weren’t email addresses. When I bullheaded it and ignored the warning, it imported them correctly.
Password Capture and Replay
Using a password manager has to be easy, or else consumers will go back to pet names and sticky notes. Like all successful password managers, Cloaked automatically captures your credentials when you log in to a secure site. When you’re signing up for a new login, you can have it generate a strong password, something virtually all competitors do. But it also asks if you would like to create a cloaked email address. The password manager in IronVest does something similar.
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When you create a new account backed by Cloaked, it initially prompts you to enter all fields, creating a cloaked email and generating a matching password. By default, the password generator generates 20-character passwords that include uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and symbols. You can check or uncheck letters, digits, or symbols if you encounter a site that restricts them. There’s also an option to generate easy-to-remember passphrases like sign.horse.bulb or raw.bold.girl.
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When you revisit a site that matches an existing identity, Cloaked offers to fill in that identity. If you have more than one match, it provides a simple menu for you to choose from. In testing, I didn’t find a site that it couldn’t handle.
(Credit: Cloaked/PCMag)
Form Filling for Personal Data
Like most password managers, Cloaked leverages its ability to fill login credentials, expanding to fill personal data on web forms. To get started using this feature, click your name at the top right of the main dashboard, then click Profile, and select Personal Information from the menu on the left.
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Cloaked stores your personal data in small bits, such as Name, Birthday, Gender, and Address. Fill in the data carefully, then click Save Changes. If you click back without saving, you lose those changes.
Dashlane and RoboForm are among the password managers that allow multiple entries in personal data fields. With Cloaked, you just get one entry per field. However, you can add multiple credit or debit cards as payment methods.
The form-filling process has improved since my last review. A cloak icon appears in the appropriate entry fields. Clicking the city field, for example, opens a menu that lets you fill just the city or the entire address. And where it previously failed to fill in the CVV along with a credit card number, this time it handled all the data just fine.
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Of course, filling out web forms isn’t a primary feature of password management. It’s just a nice bonus. And every field that Cloaked fills is one you don’t have to type yourself.
Automated Cloaking
Cloaked combines password management with a temporary email address system. As you update weak passwords, you should also consider whether you want to switch to a cloaked email. Of course, this entails going to the corresponding websites and carefully making the changes.
According to the Cloaked FAQ, the company offers a beta feature called AutoCloak that “automatically updates your existing login credentials to more secure Cloaked versions, enhancing your online privacy and security.” Also, according to the FAQ, this feature works only on a dozen or so websites.
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My contact at Cloaked revealed that this feature isn’t generally available at present, but that the Cloaked team is “excited for more users to get access to AutoCloaking in the coming months.”
Identity Sharing
In some situations, sharing passwords is necessary, such as when you share a bank account with a partner or when one person in the household manages the streaming accounts. Like most competitors, Cloaked offers secure sharing.
Password managers handle sharing in various ways. Dashlane, LogMeOnce, and NordPass are among those that create connected shares. If you’ve given the recipient permission to make changes, those changes will show up in your own password collection. Bitwarden, Keeper, and Proton Pass allow creating shared folders; everything in the folder belongs to the group.
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Click the share-box icon at the top-right of an identity to start sharing with Cloaked. You can choose to share full details (though without things like associated calls and emails) or only the identity name, URL, email, or password. Either way, it’s a read-only share. 1Password uses a similar system, and it’s an option with Bitwarden.
Cloaked creates a password-protected link that gives the recipient temporary access—for an hour, by default. You transmit the link and, for proper security, send the password by another means. The recipient can now view the information you sent, at least until the temporary access expires.
(Credit: Cloaked/PCMag)
The page that presents the shared information includes a link to install Cloaked, though it’s not entirely necessary. The recipient can copy and paste the received information into their password manager.
What’s Not Here?
Getting your existing passwords stored in a password manager is an excellent first step. However, you’re not truly taking advantage of its service until you replace all your weak and double-duty passwords with strong, unique ones. 1Password, Keeper, and Bitwarden are among the many password managers with built-in password strength reports to help you see which ones need work. IronVest goes a step further, giving you bonus points for entries that have both a strong password and a masked email address. With Cloaked, improving your passwords is a DIY task.
Securely sharing login credentials is a handy feature, but what if you’re no longer alive to initiate sharing? Bitwarden, LogMeOnce, and RoboForm, among others, offer built-in systems that let your heirs access your account, with safeguards to prevent premature access. That’s not something you get with Cloaked.
If you choose Cloaked for its ability to protect your email address and phone number, you won’t go wrong relying on it for password management as well. It doesn’t challenge the best dedicated password managers, but it’s roughly on par with what you get in IronVest.
