How To Import Passwords From Any Password Manager To MATA

Importing passwords from your current manager into MATA is the highest-leverage first move you can make toward Digital Freedom — one CSV export, one drop into the MATA Password Manager, and every credential you've collected over the last decade lives on your hardware instead of someone else's. Total time: about five minutes per vault. Total network calls to a third party: zero.

This article walks through how to import passwords from every major source — Chrome, Apple Keychain, LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden — what to do with the leftover CSV, and what changes in your daily login experience once the migration is done. The visual walkthrough lives in step 4 of the Freedom Guide; this is the long-form companion.

Why Importing Passwords Is The Highest-Leverage First Move

A typical adult carries somewhere between 100 and 300 saved logins. Most of them sit inside one or two managers — usually whatever browser you happen to use, plus a paid vault like LastPass or 1Password from before browser managers got good. Both of those failure modes share a structural problem: the credentials live on the vendor's server, encrypted with a key the vendor's infrastructure must touch to render. When the vendor gets breached, the encrypted blob ships with everything an attacker needs to crack it offline. The Federal Trade Commission's consumer privacy guidance walks through how to think about exactly this risk class.

Migrating your password manager into MATA closes the loop. The decryption key never leaves your device. The vendor doesn't hold a copy. And once your credentials are imported, every other Foundation feature — autofill in the browser extension, sync across your devices, Friends backup — works against the same encrypted vault. Trust, Security, and Incentive all compound at once.

How To Export From Your Current Password Manager

Every major manager ships a CSV export. The flows differ in where the button lives, not in what comes out. Once you have the file, the MATA import is identical regardless of source — drag, drop, done.

Google Chrome And Apple Keychain

Chrome and Apple Keychain are the two most common sources, partly because they got bundled into the OS and most people never opted into anything else. For Chrome, open chrome://password-manager/passwords, click the gear, scroll to "Export passwords," click "Download file," and confirm with your computer password. The official Chrome export guide keeps these steps current if Google rearranges the UI. For Apple Keychain on macOS Sonoma or newer, open the Passwords app, click the ••• menu, choose "Export All Passwords to File…", confirm with Touch ID, and save the CSV. Once you import passwords into MATA from either source, delete the originals so you're not leaving a plaintext copy on disk.

LastPass And 1Password

For LastPass, sign in at lastpass.com (the web vault, not the extension), click your account icon, then Advanced → Export → LastPass CSV File, and confirm with your master password. For 1Password, the web vault doesn't expose CSV — you need the desktop app. Open it, choose File → Export → pick the vault → CSV format. After you migrate your password manager into MATA, both LastPass and 1Password expose the option to delete your account entirely; once your import is verified, that's the right move. Don't pay another year for a vault you've already left.

Bitwarden And Other Vaults

For Bitwarden, open the web vault at vault.bitwarden.com, then Tools → Export Vault → file format .csv, and confirm with your master password. Any other vault (Keeper, NordPass, Dashlane, RoboForm, Enpass) ships an equivalent export — the universal format is CSV with one row per credential. If your current manager is so old it has no CSV export, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's password manager guidance explains why moving off it is overdue regardless of where you go next.

After The Import — Cleanup, Encryption, And What Changes

Once you import passwords into MATA, three things still need to happen: clean up the source files, understand where the credentials now live, and update your daily workflow.

Delete The Plaintext CSV And Audit What Came Over

The CSV you exported is plaintext. Every password in your vault is sitting in a file on your disk in human-readable form. Step one after a successful import is to delete that file — empty trash too. Then open the MATA Password Manager and skim the import. Look for duplicates from years of half-migrated vaults, dead accounts on services that no longer exist, and credentials that should be retired anyway. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's password guidance recommends rotating any password that's been in a breach; if your import surfaces some old ones, knock them out now.

How MATA Stores Your Credentials Locally

Once imported, your credentials are sealed with AES-256-GCM using a key derived from your passphrase via Argon2id — the same primitives running everything in the Foundation of Trust era. On every device with a secure chip (Apple Secure Enclave, Android StrongBox, Windows TPM), the master key is wrapped inside the chip so even malware with full OS control can't extract it. The encrypted vault sits in local storage; it syncs peer-to-peer between your devices over Iroh, never via a MATA server. Nothing about the import or storage step phones home.

What Daily Use Looks Like Once Migration Is Done

After you migrate your password manager into MATA, daily logins are usually a Touch ID prompt and a click. The browser extension reads the login form on the active tab and writes the right credential straight into the right field — no clipboard, no copy-paste, no leakage between tabs. Once your passwords are in, the next two steps in the Freedom Guide are bringing your bank accounts and contacts home. The What Is Digital Freedom piece is the brand-voice context for why all of this matters.

Take five minutes today. Export from your current manager, import passwords into MATA, delete the plaintext, and pin the extension. The vendor you just left will keep emailing you about renewal. You can keep ignoring them — your credentials are home now.