ilchalpenl
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
Hope they don't see your HN post. It is visible even without login.
Lets assume I put all the effort to explain.
I will give you a better example.
- Lets say you have a google account with pixel phone
- You are using it and added 1000 passkeys
- All are synced to your Google account
- Destroy and Get a new phone. Login to your google account with recovery code.
- All your passkeys are in your phone again.
There are plans in fidoalliance.org to make it portable. Pretty sure you are still not going to move to it.
> Approximately 90% people never go out of their country...
I am sure > 90% will happily love to have the convenience.
Yes, people like you can setup bitwarden etc. Nothing wrong. Passkey works for majority of people.
BTW, passkey can also be used without biometrics. It needs only the authentication of the device.
All these doom mongering of suspension happens so rarely that majority don't care.
There are countless reason to DIY. Agree. But passkeys will help the majority.
Also note that the kind of people - like journalists etc - that need to use DIY/local are the ones that are likely to use passkey. Reality.
These privacy zealots fail to realise that majority of population does not have time to setup bitwarden server or lineageos or zfs storage etc.
At the end, passkeys are built not for the tin-foil, (I hate Google Apple fellows), I want to keep every single locally, RMS fans. No.
A majority will benefit. End of matter.
A majority don't change platforms (I have not seen them do it).
And lets be honest - even if they were portable are you privacy person that is going to do it? No.
Once you talk about privacy/security then - I am not even sure you should do it here in HN - a bastion for encouraging Silicon valley practices.
In principle, you can remove biometrics and still use passkey (by using phone password only).
If you see my text, I wrote clearly - passkeys are great convenience + security - For the majority. People don't need to waste time in searching login names.
TBH, I was in a few Free Software Foundation Europe and linux conferences in the last year - in my view - at least half of them were using - passkey with iPhone or Android (including Playservices). So people have accepted the reality.
Lets say it is a android phone. Open amazon app. login in the usual user/password + 2FA (like with QRcode or phone). create passkey. done. This passkey would have been now synced to your google account.
Take next spouse phone. Open amazon website or app. try login it will try for passkey but cannot find it. so
- login in the usual user/password + 2FA (like with QRcode or phone). create passkey. done - Now this passkey would have synced to spouse google account.
In future, assuming you have apple or windows laptop. assume you have signed into Google (chrome). Now go to amazon. It will ask - shall I sign in with passkey. Yes, give your macos fingerprint or windows hello or password of that laptop. login Done magically. You dont even need to remember username or password.
Assuming you both have iPhones. You can sync the passkey to icloud account. And for every new iDevice it will be available.
The main bottleneck of passkey would be that all 3rd party sites will have another non-passkey way as backup to login. I have never seen a website that would say - remove all other methods and keep only passkey.
In a way passkey is 99% convenience. If a hacker would some how get your sms and password they can by-pass.
Yes, you don't use Gmail so it does not matter. You may be don't know. And often even average Joe some how has a oldphone or iPad that has oldgmail account there or logged into wife's phone or phone based SMS whatever.
it is ok to hate passkeys or google or love only self-hosted but let others do what they want.
I have been user of solokeys (since the first one) - only opensource hardware keys. works for me...
But if you go to the local highstreet then there are tons of people doing this screenrepair etc just to recover the account. Average Joe doesnot mind paying for that. Even will give the repair guy full password to transfer all data from old to new phone.