Securing your account on the Alice Website
Keep your data private and secure
What is a Session?
A session is the state of your browser being logged in to Alice. If you're logged in, your session is active. If you're logged out, it's inactive.
Active sessions can see data belonging to the user that's logged in. Inactive sessions cannot.
Where are you logged in?
If you've logged into any browser, you might still be logged in on that browser. That browser might be on a computer that you share with others, or on one of your many computers that only you can use.
If you leave a computer where you are still logged in, others people who have access to that browser on that computer can access Alice as if they were you. So please, remember to log out when you are done using a shared computer.
If at any time you believe you've left active sessions on a shared computer, you can used the "Sign out everywhere" button to immediately log out of all browser sessions.
What is an Idle Timeout?
An Idle Timeout will log out of any session that has not seen activity for a given amount of time. For instance, if you have an Idle timeout of 4 hours, then after 4 hours of inactivity, the session will no longer be active.
This is a good control for when you step away at the end of the day. You might not want to have to log in multiple times per working day, so if you know you come back to Alice after a break, but not usually after 4 hours - then set your Idle timeout to 4 hours.
Why would I want a Absolute timeout?
An Absolute Timeout is for capping the maximum duration of a login session. If you are in possession of your account credentials (you have access to your email), you can log in again at any time. But you might want to force a logout once in a while as a security measure.
If you want to make sure you have to log in again every 1 week, then set this to 1 week.
How should I adjust these settings to fit my workflow?
Here are a few examples:
If you want to be prompted to log in once at the beginning of the work week, but want to keep your account safe when there are national holidays, then you might want an Idle timeout of 1 day and an Absolute timeout of 1 week.
If you want to be prompted to log in daily, but want to keep your account safe when you leave the office at the end of the day, set your Idle timeout for 2 or 4 hours and your Absolute timeout to 1 day.
