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Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

I don't, but yes; many seriously actually believe this is why the industry is moving to passkeys. It isn't logical, it isn't reasonable, but these are your customers.

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I haven't tried--cant you share passkeys stored in your password manager?

Yes, if you're both using the same password manager. But, while you live in Silicon Valley bubbleland, most people don't. The world's most popular password manager is Excel; and sadly it does not support sharing passkeys (or, really, passkeys at all).

By now, wouldn’t the most popular password manager be the one builtin to Chrome, followed by Microsoft and Apple’s?

So that sounds like an argument for better education, not recirculating baseless conspiracy theories.

Baseless? Can you think of a reason why Netflix wouldn't support it for precisely this reason? Their campaign against account sharing is widely publicized. Do you think account sharing is easier or harder under passkeys? Just because it's a conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's false.

It’s baseless because it’s pure speculation without any evidence, or even a coherent argument for why they’d go to so much work for something they already do at much lower cost.

I think the argument is misunderstood here. I'm not saying this is the only reason that Netflix would be in favor of passkeys, just that it's one reason, not even the main one.

Here's the argument. I guess it's up to you whether you think it's coherent.

1. Netflix dislikes account sharing. They'd rather have two people pay for two subscriptions. They're a business, and are in favor of higher subscription numbers. 2. Passkeys make account sharing harder. Customer behavior modeling probably suggests that some fraction of account share-ers would create new subscriptions if they switched to passkeys. 3. Of all the reasons Netflix is in favor or against passkeys, this reason is in favor of them, via 1. and 2.

I think the argument was a flippant response by another user riffing off of a conspiracy theorist who misunderstood how passkeys work, and while I appreciate the effort you’ve made trying to salvage it I am skeptical that Netflix would be motivated enough to be part of their hypothetical Netflix/Google/Microsoft/Apple conspiracy but not enough to even implement passkey support.

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