Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanitycheck | Hacker News Reader

You are correct about all of that.

But personally, as a technically able user, my risk of randomly losing access to my Google (or MS, Apple, Meta, etc) account is far greater than from all those threats combined.

If we had a trustworthy and accountable authority operating this stuff then it would be great. But we don't, we have a bunch of companies who are neither of those things.

It's like mandating that everyone must use self-driving cars that are on average safer than human motorists but occasionally randomly drive off a cliff.

View on HN

You can use whatever passkey/password manager you want to though. You don’t need to use Google or Apple’s password/passkey manager apps if you don’t want to. Passkeys are WebAuthn credentials, which is an open standard, and it’s being supported by an increasing number of password manager apps.

In theory. Let's see how that pans out over the next couple of years, I think imposing platform lock-in in is going to be impossible for them to resist.

What about the users who _aren’t_ technically able? That’s where this technology is most important at the moment.

That aside, what happens if you lose your current password? Every major platform out there has a method for recovery. Why can’t that be used for passkeys as well? I don’t see how there’s any incentive for companies to lock us out of accounts, when the platform is pointless without people consuming it.

We may have very little power, as users, but if enough people have trouble getting into their own accounts, that’s going to directly impact the bottom line of the company locking them out. From a purely capitalist standpoint, that’s a really good reason to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Lastly, at least Bitwarden is planning on having passkey support in their password manager very soon, so there’s real competition that will allow users to be in full control of their own passkeys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com