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So I had saved some some passwords in my Safari on my Mac (Mavericks). I went to Safari > Preferences > Passwords > Remove All to remove all the stored passwords. But no matter how many times I do it, all of them keep coming back. All autofill options are disabled. I also disabled the cloud keychain on my iPhone.

I don't want to have any Passwords stored in cloud or anywhere. What am I missing?

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2 Answers 2

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Found the solution. I searched for keychain in spotlight and found something called Keychain Access. All the passwords were here under Login. When I deleted them from here, it removed them from Safari as well.

Safari's preference to Remove All just removes the locally stored passwords in Safari and not the ones that are in the user keychain.

Additionally, go to System Preferences and make sure that keychain syncing is disabled if you don't want any data stored in iCloud. You can empty that keychain if desired using Keychain Access before disabling the sync for extra security if you are sure no other devices depend on keychain syncing.

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  • @bmike♦, Thanks for updating the answer with good explanation!
    – rgamber
    Commented Jan 5, 2014 at 1:16
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    You stepped up and documented the answer - I just polished a little to let it shine.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jan 5, 2014 at 2:08
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I had the problem that for a particular website that I would occasionally log in to the username field started autofilling with a huge bunch of gibberish. However, no matter how many times I looked in the Safari saved passwords on my Mac that bit of gibberish was no where to be found, but would also autofill. It would even autofill on my iPhone, but it wasn't in the Safari saved passwords.

So the other answer helped me figure it out. That gibberish was saved in the Keychain and not in Safari. Deleting it there fixed my problem. However, if that gibberish was saved in my keychain but was also on my iPhone then that means the keychain was being synced as well, and not just what Safari has saved. So be aware of that as well if you want to remove everything from the cloud. I also know that the keychain shares across the cloud because as soon as I've put a wifi password in on one device then my other devices will connect to that wifi automatically as well. There are several things that get shared and not just your Safari passwords.

UPDATE (restored after being deleted): I'm sorry I couldn't just make this a comment on the other correct answer but at the time of writing I didn't have enough reputation to leave comments so I was forced to write this as an answer against my will. I hope I'm forgiven. (And please don't censor me. I'm all for editing what I wrote for clarity, but what I said in this update is the truth and so help me I might just give up on SE if someone removes it again without asking me about it first.)

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  • Welcome to Ask Different. Thanks for taking the time to answer, but I am having a hard time understanding how this is an answer and not a long comment. Consider editing so there is a succinct answer first, then supporting details as necessary
    – Allan
    Commented Apr 27, 2017 at 17:42
  • @Allan I didn't want to make this an answer and would have rather just left a comment on the other answer, but when I wrote this answer I didn't have sufficient reputation to write comments, which is rather frustrating. I understand the idea of limiting certain functions by amount of reputation in order to prevent bots and trolls from causing mayhem but I don't get why comments require more reputation than answers. And this is exactly why. I got a down vote for doing something I genuinely didn't want to have to do but I wasn't allowed to do what I wanted to due to the reputation system.
    – RTHarston
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 7:17
  • You've got enough reputation to comment everywhere (see apple.stackexchange.com/help/privileges)
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 7:36
  • @patrix I do now, but I didn't when I wrote the answer.
    – RTHarston
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 9:31
  • @allan Just checking in a couple years later to say I'm still ticked off by this stupid behavior. I know it isn't an easy system to balance, but I still feel like the system is very off-putting to new users that genuinely want to participate in the community but aren't allowed to because they are too inexperienced to have good answers, yet aren't allowed to comment because they are still too new. So they are stuck in a silent limbo waiting for the rare question one of the big guys hasn't gotten to yet, or hope to get a couple upvotes from the people that bothered to scroll past the top answer.
    – RTHarston
    Commented Dec 18, 2019 at 5:08

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