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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

> What I don't like bout Google doing this is that the big providers use this to tether and lock you in to their platform.

This is not what they want. They want to a) ensure passwords/accounts aren't being shared to ensure a single account is tied to a single user. They want this for all apps so they can recognize revenue for every user. b) They want more information on you as a user (as opposed to your family member on the same account). The wet dream is per-device, per-user profiles. Possibly even different [additional] costs for each attached device.

That is their goal. Big Tech all want this. That it increase friction to migrate is a side benefit (honestly not so much more than with passwords now). That it happens to benefit users is the lure to draw you in.

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Can you explain how passkeys explicitly reaches that end goal, when all of that is already currently possible without passkeys?

You can share passwords easily, I don't think you can trivially share passkeys.

You can trivially share passkeys with others, at least on all apple devices:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph0dd1796bb/16...

You don’t need to share them because you can enroll more than one for a given account. So for example if 3 people are sharing an account, you can enroll 3 passkeys for that account and they each have their own access.

I don’t see any way that passkeys kill account sharing.

What the other user says is that maybe those companies will only let 1 device per account to be registered. So you can’t have 2 devices to login. Harder to share.

In this case, Google, that isn't true and just they're mostly treated as special Security Keys ("yubikeys" etc).

To limit it to just one defeats the purpose of all this work. You really will only see that where there is a technical limitation (like... why does AWS only allow a single hardware key per user? If you setup SSO then you can have any number of keys)

Hey, shhh, new thing bad! Get with the program! Not enough fear mongering and too much rational thinking.

It's not fear mongering to have and express concerns about a technology. Especially a technology that many people want to force everyone to use whether they want to or not.

In fact, it's important that people do this so that the invalid concerns can be put to rest and (hopefully) the valid concerns can be mitigated.

I think it's simpler than that. Expenditure is linked to trust. Companies and platforms that erode trust, make less money in the long run - they have to continually exert energy to attract customers. Companies / platforms that focus on building and retaining your trust have to work less hard to have you part with your money.

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