I’ve avoided “passkeys” like the plague, but with Google [promising a password-less future](https://safety.google/authentication/passkey/) and Apple [forcefully moving people to passkeys going forward](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10125/?time=258), I guess it’s time to figure out what they are.
I consider myself a tech person, but the more I hear about these *passkeys*, the less I understand. Apple’s [overview](https://developer.apple.com/passkeys/) says that they’ll be used “alongside” passwords, so I don’t get what’s being **replaced**, and why the hell we need them. Fido Alliance (the folks that apparently invented the damn thing) says that [passwords are a problem](https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/), but reading this, it doesn’t seem like it’s **my** problem they talk about.
What I **do** understand though, is that one day I’ve had someone walk into my hotel room in Poland, and walk out with my laptop and cell phone while I was asleep^1.
**So, overnight, I ended up without access to any of my devices or phone number abroad**.
Luckily, because I was still in the password-ful past, I could log into my email and Skype from hotel’s computer, and let my wife know that I need some help.
what this scenario wood look like in the future when everything gets switched to passkeys.
____
^(**[1]:**) ^(I have forgotten to lock the door – learn from my mistake. To Krakow police’s credit, they *actually caught the thief* several months later.)
In: Technology
A passkey is a complicated password that’s generated on your phone and shared to the website when you authenticate yourself to it (the phone, that is). A regular password has to be remembered by humans and is thus easy to guess. A passkey, on the other hand, is remembered by your device (a small computer) and is thus much more secure. With fingerprint and face detection used on the device, it’s vastly more secure than a regular password, assuming you don’t lock your phone with a four-digit code.
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