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Passkeys are not a trap. Use them!
(hachyderm.io)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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Privacy
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But most people don't have well managed passwords. And me having good password hygiene doesn't stop my data being hacked when someone working at a subcontracting firm to a company I use leaks all my data.
It also is annoying to have to log in over many steps with 2fa, often forced to email or SMS.
Collectively improving security benefits us all.
I think the point about lusers not being able to manage passwords has been argued to death elsewhere, so I won't take issue with that.
What has this to do with passkeys? Are you sending your password in plaintext to the contractor who stores it that way, unencrypted? That's a separate problem entirely. The only benefit I see with just sending them your public key is that they can't leak your private key, whereas if you used one password for everything, and sent it to them, they could leak it.
Am I missing something? Would passkeys offer an advantage over a password manager? What if the website assigns you a password via DH so that users can't pick bad ones or reuse them, would it have the same advantages?
2FA can be super annoying, but again I think it's a separate issue. If I get control of your phone or laptop then 2FA might save you, but passkeys won't.
It sounds like they're saying that if you can manage your passwords then do so yourself and avoid passkeys, but if you can't/don't want to then use passkeys.
And they are pointing out that the company is far more likely to lose your password than you are.
Convenience vs security, but the weakest link is probably not the user.
I think you're mixing up compromise of an account with compromise of the data associated with that account.
If a particular piece of data is accessible to people of a dozen accounts, compromise of any of those accounts potentially compromises the data. That's a legitimate concern for people who want certain data secured, whether other accounts with access are also secure. In some cases, it may be best to have an authentication policy that provides a baseline level of protection even for the most clueless users, rather than a system where you're able to secure your own account.
I follow you, but if we can impose passkeys on the security-inept people we are forced to give our sensitive data to, couldn't we instead force them to use good security?
It's been like 25 years since the security world basically moved on from assuming that users could be trusted to act securely. We gotta design processes and protocols that keep things secure even with people who have bad habits.
I can secure my email, but every email I send or receive touches at least one other mailbox I don't control, of some other user. Same with text messages, social media posts, etc. The digital world we use has a billion overlapping people, some with escalated privileges as employees or admins or mods or whatever. We can't make them perfect, so we should design systems that work well even with imperfect people.
I couldn't possibly argue with that
I’m saying that bad user passwords allow data to be hacked. When it’s the credentials of someone with access, like an employee of companies with your data, then that data is more easily compromised if they have crappy passwords. It’s harder to compromise with passkeys. It is not just your password hygiene that protects your data.
Here is a recent example in Australia. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-06/asos-app-users-sent-hacked-message/107236520
That doesn't say anything about passwords. Looks like someone's device was accessed. Maybe you just understand this better than I do.
Ok, here’s another one from Netherlands. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/hacker-claims-123456-password-let-them-breach-the-danish-national-registry-accessing-8-8-million-records-it-and-data-services-company-with-weak-passwords-linked-source-of-the-hack
If the people with access to your data have weak passwords, then so do you.