Passkeys are an alternative way to sign into stuff like your email or bank account. They are long strings of numbers generated on your phone or computer, and they are much more secure than passwords. Due to their technical nature, they can protect you against traditional attacks like phishing. Without going into mathematical detail, they make your life more secure for sure.
But I hate them, and here’s why: they make us more dependent on devices. Let me explain. You need a device like a phone to generate passkeys. You can’t make them up yourself. So in practice, that means you will be very dependent on your phone to log into everything.
Of course, phones aren’t strictly necessary because there are other ways to use passkeys. You could use a password manager like Bitwarden or a hardware key like Yubikey. For those new to hardware keys, they are just little devices that look like USB keys but they have hardware inside that can generate large numbers to be used as passkeys. And paradoxically, using passkeys in this way makes a person less dependent on the smartphone since this method obviates the need for smartphones for two factor authentication.
For example, on MacOS, I can create a passkey login for a website and store it on my iCloud keychain, which will be available on all my Apple devices. That’s how a lot of people will use them — and now if I want to switch to Linux and ditch Apple? Not so easy. You can export your traditional passwords out of the iCloud keychain, but not the passkeys. Those can only be shared with other users with Apple devices. Convenient, isn’t it?
But regardless, my point is that passkeys tie you to some kind of technological solution on a physical device to use them. Again, in practice, that means you will be tied to your phone, or to Apple’s cloud keychain, or to some half-baked Google solution. And, the passkey standard and will evolve, become more complex, and thus cause even more lock-in for the end user.
That’s why tech companies love passkeys: not because they make your life easier, but because it will make the masses tightly tied to their advanced solutions. And as the system becomes more advanced, most people will fall deeper into a dependence on Google’s or Apple’s ecosystems.
Therefore, your life online becomes more your life, and you have less freedom in the real world outside of technology. It means that you’ll have to buy more pieces of plastic or be tied to your smartphone or simply be tied to specific devices just to exist, because so many online services are becoming essential.
Make no mistake, to the problem of making online accounts more secure, passkeys are a great solution. But the existence of that very problem I argue highlights a much more serious problem: life online is becoming more critical and more difficult to secure. And due to this, passkeys are being heavily pushed.
And big tech becoming more entrenched is a horrible thing, a nightmare, and one step closer to a tech oligarchy where ordinary people are peons and cogs to further the concentration of wealth into the hands of the tech elite. And one step closer to a future where we have no choice but to ravage the earth for raw materials to develop even more technology, moving ourselves further and further from truly living free with nature.
My solution is different: use technology less, and make life less dependent on computers so that all those accounts are less valuable for hackers. It’s a decision we have to make as a society. But if we do that, then we won’t need so many technological solutions to keep us safe, because all that online stuff won’t be valuable enough to steal. And the upshot is that instead of fiddling with endless devices and staring at screens all day, we can just go outside and enjoy the birds and the flowers and plants and animals, which is where we should be.