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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't the passkey have to be on her phone or computer?

It should be but haven’t checked her apple vault. I checked Google password manager and her windows password manager and there nothing in either. She might have used her phone and it’s in her iOS vault which I’ll check next. But this is what makes this entire passkey thing a mess. She’s 75, she didn’t do this on purpose and the ecosystem is just a mess

Even the concept of "where on the PC" has been totally annihilated by OS vendors and app developers. Is it on the filesystem? Is it on The Cloud? Is it vaguely "In An App"? Is it in some "Secure Enclave"? Who the fuck knows anymore? And the apps are no help--they insist on blurring the lines between local and cloud, hiding full paths, and generally just saying "Don't worry about where your data actually is. We pinky swear to be able to find it for you!"

Windows prompting her about Bluetooth for the pass key threw me too. I thought for sure she had clicked the wrong thing before I realized that somehow her widows pass key requires communicating to some device? Maybe her phone? No idea

I know on my Windows if I sign into icloud.com I have the option of using a passkey which I do by scanning a picture with my iPhone and it also using Bluetooth, presumably to prove physical presence of it.

Everything about it is.

Also in the process of helping my dad with his phone, 76 and my grandmother 99. Maybe this works better with Apple, but the biggest problem on Android is, that it feels like every update shuffles everything around. Allmost no point in explaining, that they can solve some things on their own.

And all the time new things on the screen, new features they don't understand, need nor asked for.

Im young and I dont even bother learning how to use my Android phone's new features since it feels like everything moves or changes all the time. there's no point trying to get familiar with most of the features.

if any android pms or execs read this comment, it should be like a slap in the face. a scathing indictment of the state of their product.

just hang their heads in shame and walk into the sea

We're at a point where the biggest possible contribution to humanity of many PMs in big corps would be to just... drop dead. Feature-freeze rather than furthering the enshittification, as that seems all they're capable of.

I'd wish the world would just become boring again.

They’d just hire more to replace them and keep chaos machine running

That's because most people at Google use iPhones as their primary phones, they hardly know or care about the UX

Apple does seem to have one of the best and most secure passkey implementations.

A little snarky, but...

It _is_ true that it's more secure when even the people that the passkey was created for can't use it.

They seem unnecessarily opaque about it all.

I just made one for PayPal using my MacBook which seems to have ended up in Bitwarden rather than the mac thing. But there's nothing in Bitwarden to say list all passkeys. Not sure how I check elsewhere. Maybe they should email you "you have created a paypal passkey in Tim's Bitwarden" or something. Then at least you could search the email for "passkey"?

I wonder if I can use Bitwarden on another device with that? I honestly don't know.

You can't search for passkeys, but you can search for logins by URL and check the much shorter list for passkeys. The good news is that having the passkey in Bitwarden means you can use it on another device.

No, it doesn't have to be associated with the phone, and IMO you are better off not letting the big tech companies own your identity, which is effectively getting Apple or Google to store it in your phone for you ends up being. There are physical passkeys that feel like a door key in everyday use. You can attach them to your house key ring, and like house keys are near indestructible. Lookup the Yubikey 5 NFC.

The only downside is unlike a house key, you can't get a backup "cut". Copying a physical passkey currently isn't possible. If you lose it, you've lost access to all your logins. As the article says, their recommended workaround is to keep backup physical passkeys, and log all your passkeys (including the backups) into every site. Which is insane - very few people have the patience to do that.

The article is really a long rant about that one issue - there is currently no way to securely backup a physical passkey. Solve that, and all the other issues melt away.

Who the fuck knows?

I for sure don't. Websites only know there is a passkey associated with my account, and the OS only knows there might be one on the device, or maybe on another device, and offers me options to check here or do a Bluetooth/QR Code dance, and when all of them fail, I'm no closer to knowing where the damn passkey is.

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