I'm having video problems with my MacBook Pro, and will need to take it in for service. The last time I had my computer in for service, the technician said he needed my login password. I didn't have much option except to give it to him. However, with recent news of renegade employees stealing user account info, there's no way that I'll let anyone have a password that will essentially allow access to all of my online bank accounts and credit card accounts via Keychain Access and whatever other facility that web browsers use to remember passwords. I don't see any way of disabling automatic logins though.

Is there a way to temporarily disable Keychain Access and the remembered passwords on Firefox & Safari?

I'm running OSX Sierra on a 2015 MacBook Pro.

I'm not certain in which version of the OS it disappeared, but Keychain Access used to offer an option to have your keychain password differ from your login password. (I was quite unhappy when it disappeared!)

Take a look in your KA menu bar, probably under either "File" or "Edit," and see if it's available to you.

I believe that Safari can't access its saved passwords with KA "locked," but I've got no idea about other browsers.

Thanks. Yes, there is an item in the Edit menu that I'd missed: "Change Password for Keychain Login"

Safari, seems to be mostly secure now, although it still remembers my bank card number, which is somewhat disturbing, but it doesn't remember the password.
With Firefox, I see that I can go into its preferences and view/edit/delete all of the passwords that it has saved. Not as useful as being able to temporarily lock them, but I can easily export them to a text file on a removable drive, for later restoration, and then delete them.

For future, I'm going to have to investigate having all of the keychain stuff on a thumb drive.

Safari draws passwords from an "Autofill" item it places in Keychain Access, and it would seem logical for Firefox to do the same thing. You don't see a "Firefox" item in KA?

Searching for either Firefox or Mozilla in KA turns up nothing. Since Firefox is a cross platform app, they probably don't make use of KA. After changing the KA password to something different than my acct login password, Safari now asks me to login to KA, but Firefox doesn't, and Firefox still has all of its web passwords. So, I'll have to delete them separately.

Thanks for the follow-up...good info.

Particularly in today's security conscious environment, I"m surprised that Firefox doesn't provide some mechanism for securing your passwords.

I'd file a feature request.

Considering all of the security breaches that you hear about in the news, I've come to the conclusion that what these companies say and do are two different things.

That notwithstanding, this is such BASIC security that I find it difficult to believe that it's been overlooked.

So I went looking and found that Firefox offers a "primary password" option (under Prefs > Privacy & Security) that sounds like a satisfactory solution.

Thanks for that. It's exactly what I was looking for.
I guess I didn't scroll down far enough to see the primary password setup. But then, I've been in a rush to get this computer secured in case it suddenly fails.

I'm wondering how people deal with the problem now that dual KA passwords are no longer an option?

Must everybody who hasn't got a good memory purchase an app?

And then again, I doubt that all that many people took advantage of the option when it was an option. How did they deal with the problem pre-apps?

Many people I know kept keep a post-it note with the three or four passwords they used use for everything, stuck on the monitor or they have only one password ().

So their passwords never get to Keychain Access. What could be more secure?

(Your spoiler didn't come through.)

The fact that Safari remembers anything about something as personal as banking is indeed disturbing. How do you know that it does that?

If you go to Safari > Preferences > Autofill and select Credit Cards, Edit..., you can see which cards Safari remembers. You can change or delete any of them from there.

are you saying that when you click on it password is not revealed?

Oops! My eyes played a trick on me.

You posted and when "password" was revealed, the second instance didn't register.

Thanks for the guidance....I checked and have none saved. Whew!

When I go to my bank's login page, Safari enters the card number. I suspect that safari doesn't actually know that it's my bank card number. My bank's website uses my card number as my sign-in account number, making the bank at least partly to blame. So, when I go to my bank's website, Safari probably just thinks it's auto-entering a user name. I doubt that anyone could do very much with the number, because it's a chip card, and would still need a PIN number to go with it. I'll check the other suggestions about removing credit card numbers and see if that works.

I could probably just remove Safari from my computer altogether, considering that I hardly ever use it. Ever since Firefox brought out its major upgrade a few years ago, I've been very happy with it, and have only used Safari on extremely rare occasions when I encounter a cantankerous website.

BTW, the one drawback of setting the KA password different from the login password is that now when I log in, I get hit with a barrage of requests from various system utilities that want to access the keychain.