Statistics are hard. People have a bad habit of seeing 'not 100% fullproof' and thinking that said something is therefore worthless. Same senseless argument people made in the 80s against wearing seatbelts, and 4 years ago thinking it was a legitimate argument against wearing masks in the middle of a pandemic.
passkeys imho are being pushed because:
1) a lot of people will not use a (good) password manager
2) it allows more lock-in for the providers (ios/android/1password/etc.)
They don't
> have less lock-in
I have physical security tokens from multiple vendors which support passkeys. I have Windows machines with passkeys. I have Android devices with passkeys. Tell me again how it is a vendor lock-in? I'm not seeing it.
(You should use a Google account as your primary online identity, unless you have religious reasons not to. Back up your authenticators, set up back up accounts, all that stuff; Google doesn't want you locked out any more than you do, because that requires them to attempt customer service, so they have a bunch of tools here.)
People that by into systems they don't control are shooting themselves in the foot because, when push comes to shove, a for-profit company will always chose profit over individually choice. It's short sighted to think otherwise.
Either way: Passkeys themselves don't require you to use Google, or any particular big tech firm. It's an open protocol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805
This was more than two years ago. Despite the title, many parents are victims to this. To this very day, Google continues to defame them and deny access to their accounts. Long after the police cleared these victims' names. Long after the NYT confronted Google about this.
So is this what "normies" should be subject to? A digital totalitarian hellscape in which a trillion dollar advertising giant rummages through people's digital lives, randomly takes away their entire digital identity every time their flawed cyber-oracle tells them to, and uses their vast corporate resources to harass and defame?
That's not a world I want to live in. I don't want anyone to be subject to that kind of tyranny. It's not about any "religious belief," but rather basic human decency.
Your whole argument is a misunderstanding of how they work.
> Yeah that's great, I don't subscribe to that particular religion but respect your beliefs. I think most people are best served having their primary online identity be a Google account, for multiple reasons. I'm aware that a vocal contingent of technologists on HN find that take appalling, but I assure you, my take is a normie take, and also the modal take among security people.
Also, Richard Stallman? Where did that come from? This has nothing to do with free software at all. I'm also capable of drawing my own conclusions without someone else whispering in my ear, if that's what you're suggesting.
It's not honest discussion.
I don't have any control how any site I didn't build actually handles my password.
And the real independent implementations like bitwarden are often blocked by sites like PayPal does.
Often repeated. Doesn't make it true. As mentioned, I've got passkeys for services registered on multiple brands of physical authenticators and several platforms.
Other implementations are often blocked, eg on paypal I've never been able to do it and they also only allow one.
The big tech ones don't have these issues but I won't use them because I want to keep control.
About the only site I've come across that still only limits a single authenticator is the only one you've already mentioned. If I pointed out a site that only allowed five character upper case passwords with no lockout policy and really fast responses is that also proof passwords are completely untenable? Or just one actor with poor policy decisions And in the end one can just choose to not use passkeys with sites like PayPal. But the extreme majority I've used allowed multiple, as that's what the specifications recommended.
In the end you can use passkeys without involving Google or Microsoft or Apple at all. Any argument that passkeys lock you into their platforms isn't based in reality and are repeating untruths. You don't need to use them to use passkeys.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/you-can-now-assign-mul...
It's entirely possible that many sites shared this flaw.
Adoption is really slow. But yeah ok, if multiple are allowed then yes it's no longer a problem. I'm sure I read of more sites that had this problem but it is indeed possible they're fixed now.