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Comment by 201984 | Hacker News Reader

201984

It's great until they break their phone, or spill coffee on it, or just lose it, and now they are locked out of EVERYTHING with no good way to get back in.

Passwords on a piece of paper for better or worse do not have that problem.

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Only if they're not backing up their phone, which seems insane in this day and age.

And even if they're not, if they have a computer or tablet, the passkey will still be available there assuming they share an account.

You can also recover your iCloud Keychain via a designated/trusted Recovery Contact (e.g. spouse, who presumably hasn't destroyed their phone at the exact same time), or via iCloud Keychain escrow.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/passwords-devices-iph...

Both of the major smartphone companies (Google and Apple) have pretty robust account recovery processes. Are you familiar with all the options they have? Your comment gives me the impression that you are making assumptions about what would happen, instead of doing research on how it actually works.

I experienced Google's recently and it was very robust.

Even before passkeys, the average user would have major problems if Apple and Google didn't have good account recovery processes.

>with no good way to get back in.

which is why at the very least your email provider gives you a recovery kit to print out (the equivalent of the notebook) and if you can get back into that account you'll likely be able to get into whatever else you signed up for.

There's no difference here between passkeys and any other central storage be it a password manager or a physical notebook. If you lose that access, well you're screwed. But it always beats having hotdog123 as your password for 70 different sites.

Password managers can be backed up onto USB drives pretty easily, and copies can be made of paper.

It's much more difficult to make comparable backups of passkeys due to all the "anti phishing" / vendor lock-in rules most platforms have.

Android syncs them to your Google account and iPhone to your iCloud account by default. Which isn't a perfect solution but, again, is pretty good for most people.

And I just found out recently that you can't log into Google on a desktop without responding to a prompt on your Android phone. Which, if you broke said phone, you can't do.

This is without 2fa enabled on my Google account.

There are a few alternate options like email or sms (I've used them several times, you have no option if you erase your only actively-used phone occasionally), but yeah. Google effectively forces 2FA whether you like it or not.

I don't think this is correct

Have you ever been locked out of your Apple account?

Maybe because your kid was playing with your phone and kept entering the wrong passcode and now you’re locked out for several hours?

Or because Apple detests anyone else touching your phone and you’re traveling internationally and your screen cracked and you took it to a local repair shop which in the process of replacing the screen triggered something Apple didn’t like and you’re locked out for a decade.

And that's great, as long as you're totally cool with access to _any_ of your accounts _anywhere_ being completely controlled by either Apple or Google.

I was just correcting the parent post that implied the passkeys were only stored on the device. Personally I do not use that feature.

I'm also pretty sure I don't have any accounts that can ONLY be accessed via passkey.

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