There is a danger in training people to bad standards or practices. For example, phishing. For quite some time banks have been sending emails to their customers with links in them. This, in turn, has enabled phishermen to lure these customers into their hooks, so to speak, by embedding links that direct to their own mock web pages to harvest passwords.

So, while I see your point, I’d rather this feature not be there just for the sake of not giving people the false impression that a bad (or a slightly less bad) choice of password is actually a good one.

I totally disagree.

Something that goes some way towards guiding users towards using secure passwords is better than nothing?

It might not guide all users to a more secure password, but if it guides some proportion of users to a more secure password, that is a Good Thing.

It’s rare to see a substantial usability mistake at Google, and so this jumped out at me. Saar Drimer has a post on the new “Gmail password strength check,” in which he quotes Google’s password advice: Don’t use a password……