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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

If you're using a USB hardware token your knowledge of it is at least an order of magnitude better than the median user's. I know where my passkeys are stored, I don't know where my family member's passkeys are stored and neither do they. The same is true for most of my otherwise fairly technical co-workers.

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There needs to be industry and government leadership on this to gradually require hardware token usage, for at least critical financial and government applications. Right now everyone is putting their energy behind passkeys, but those are much harder to understand than a physical token. I don’t know any non-technical people who understand how passkeys are normally tied to the device (or the manufacturer-provided cloud account in some cases), how to set them up on a second device, why you might want to do that, etc. And many technical people still don’t get it either!

Absolutely not. If that is required, I will do my damndest to only use implementations that deliberately lie about the hardware status. Your line of reasoning is dangerous.

Then that family member does not worry like you do worry. The main point is assuming one can have a proper security for Google account - everything else becomes easy.

The fearmongering of losing google account should stop. Yes, some people lose it. There are a larger proportion losing/getting pwned by repeat use. For the majority - just pressing the fingerprint to access an account (like amazon/eBay) via passkey is great.

Fairly technical co-workers - I used to suggest them to buy USB security key few years ago. Now that same fairly technical some how has at least 2 devices with them - so they just skipped the USB security key need - and just use Google (in Android) or iPhone in Apple ecosystem. Everything just works.

Yes, there will be a poor soul that may lost everything with only one device.

People keep their entire lives in cloud accounts these days. Their passwords, financial history, copies of important documents, baby photos, etc. Losing access to it is incredibly disruptive and may result in unrecoverable losses.

It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.

At the same time, I know so many people believing DIY raspberrypi based NAS and losing lots of data (thankfully they had cloud backups).

Not everyone has access to server grade hardware.

>Then that family member does not worry like you do worry.

Until they lose access to that account and then it becomes my problem to solve.

This is a different issue. Not everyone has a data engineer - know it all as a family member.

And you need to accept it works for millions.

Working for millions doesn't imply a good hit rate. Google could release a feature that worked 1% of the time and manage that, as well as barely noticing if it wipes out 10% of their users. My actual experience is that almost all the people I know who are using passkeys are using them by mistake and it's only not a big problem because they aren't currently being used up to their promise of preventing the vulnerable authentication methods.

My actual experience is people with passkey are fine. No more account take over. Mote over they like frictionless login.

Yes there are few that used bitwarden and lost everything as their sync using syncthing failed.

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