If you haven’t heard about “Passkeys” yet, I have some great news…
Passkeys are ushering in the end of the long-despised password! The concept of passkeys has been brewing for a very long time, but sometimes an idea is just too early to be successful – you need infrastructure around it. For example, taking a cross-country trip in your car is no big deal today because you can rest assured that there will be gas stations all along the way, coast to coast. Yet this is why people have “range anxiety” about electric vehicles — you can’t same the same about charging stations coast to coast, and nobody wants to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere on a dead battery.
Passkeys use biometrics (your fingerprint or face recognition) to recognize it’s you and let you in. The industry couldn’t replace passwords with passkeys until everyone had a way of authenticating. Even just 10 years ago that wasn’t realistic. Today, most people carry cell phones with facial or fingerprint recognition technology, right in their pockets. Laptops are shipping with fingerprint scanners and/or cameras built-in. There’s now the necessary “critical mass” in the marketplace to make it work.
The rollout of passkeys has started in earnest. There are scores of sites you can now register a passkey with and forget about passwords altogether. Passkeys can’t be “phished” like passwords. They can’t be stolen and breached like we see reports almost daily of another 5 million passwords hacked and dumped on the dark web… They’re safer, more secure, and fix the “oops, I forgot my password” problem. Now just authenticate with a fingerprint on your mobile phone or laptop, and you’re off and running!
We highly recommend reviewing your options and converting to passkeys when given the opportunity, if you have a device capable of fingerprint and/or facial recognition technology. It’s the wave of the future, and it can’t come fast enough!