I’ve gone into Settings->Passwords and have deleted old account/passwords I no longer need. Have tried both batch deletions as well as deleting them one at a time, but they simply don’t go away. Anyone else have this problem or have a fix?
iPad Pro, iPadOS 16
The thing to understand about keychain and passwords under macOS is they are stored in several places:
Assuming you have iCloud turned off for passwords (lets not make this any more complex and error prone than it already is) then you might expect you could just edit/delete passwords in Safari and /or Keychain access and the machine would just figure things out and sync everything. i.e. how they work in Firefox.
In my experience this often does not happen, you delete a password in Keychain and Safari will 'helpfully' save its cached password back to the keychain a few seconds later.
You delete a password in Safari and it will 'helpfully' re-import it from Keychain a few seconds later, and so you are getting nowhere.
The trick is to close Safari completely (don't just close the window, press Command-Q to completely exit.)
Then edit or delete the password using the utility Keychain Access and wait a few seconds before opening Safari again.
There is one extra wrinkle to this, if you have ever updated macOS to a major new version, the keychain permissions can get messed up which will prevent you from deleting any passwords that were migrated from the old install.
To fix this in Keychain Access, double click on the entry and tick 'Show password', Edit it to be something different and save. Now you should be able to delete it.
Many website passwords will have 2 entries, one under the "Local Items" Keychain and one under the "Login" Keychain (I have no idea why), you need to delete both.
The thing to understand about keychain and passwords under macOS is they are stored in several places:
Assuming you have iCloud turned off for passwords (lets not make this any more complex and error prone than it already is) then you might expect you could just edit/delete passwords in Safari and /or Keychain access and the machine would just figure things out and sync everything. i.e. how they work in Firefox.
In my experience this often does not happen, you delete a password in Keychain and Safari will 'helpfully' save its cached password back to the keychain a few seconds later.
You delete a password in Safari and it will 'helpfully' re-import it from Keychain a few seconds later, and so you are getting nowhere.
The trick is to close Safari completely (don't just close the window, press Command-Q to completely exit.)
Then edit or delete the password using the utility Keychain Access and wait a few seconds before opening Safari again.
There is one extra wrinkle to this, if you have ever updated macOS to a major new version, the keychain permissions can get messed up which will prevent you from deleting any passwords that were migrated from the old install.
To fix this in Keychain Access, double click on the entry and tick 'Show password', Edit it to be something different and save. Now you should be able to delete it.
Many website passwords will have 2 entries, one under the "Local Items" Keychain and one under the "Login" Keychain (I have no idea why), you need to delete both.
Do you have safari as a browser? I wonder if they are reloading from a cloud backup of your safari pages?
If you use safari try to go in and throw away your recent history and see if that keeps the passwords from coming back. There may be a cookie on the ipad that is replacing those deleted files.
I have this same problem with 17.0 and 17.1... massively frustrating to do the work to cleanup duplicates and old accounts only to have them all appear again the next day. Makes it hard to trust and move fully away from another password locker like 1Password, LastPass, etc.
Same exact experience. I had warnings about easy to guess, duplicate passwords etc and I spent hours deleting, using complex 'strong' passwords provided by keychain only to have the old ones all re-appear. It's not just the inconvenience of having old accounts back it is the fact that I must now go to every account and do a forgot password exercise because it restored all the easy to guess, duplicate passwords that the system was warning me against. What an abject failure in the design of this service.
Deleted saved-passwords keep coming back
