Comment by freakynit
5 days ago
Do not handover your identity, or verification of it (as the current case is) to anyone else, irrespective of the benefits, including the security aspect.
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The author has strong incentives for the success of passkeys.
1. Scott Helme is founder and CEO of Report URI, and Companies House records his ownership at over 25% and up to 50%. Report URI markets a "Passkeys Protection" offering, giving him a commercial interest in services for passkey adopters.
2. His WhyNoPasskeys.com campaign pushes websites to adopt passkeys, is sponsored by Report URI, and promotes its passkey protection services. The "Passkeys Are Not a Trap" article also carries a Report URI sponsor banner.
3. Troy Hunt, Helme’s Report URI business partner and investor, joined 1Password’s advisory board in 2020; Helme has also appeared in Hunt’s 1Password-sponsored content. That establishes an indirect vendor connection.
Virtually every authority on passkeys is going to have an industry connection. Just like how most climate change authorities receive funding to do climate research, how SEC investigators typically have backgrounds in banking, open source military analysts are veterans, etc.
It's not because people are bought by the powers that be, it's the way the world works. People enter the fields they have expertise in.
The guy literally owns a business in this space and has a huge financial incentive to push passkey adoption. Technically he has an "industry connection" just like millions of other people who work in tech and happen to know about passkeys through other work, but conflating the two is wildly misleading. His perspective is as far away from unbiased as possible.
Research funding is hardly perfect, but most of the people studying climate change are doing actual research and trying to draw evidence based conclusions that hold up under peer review. Their incentives are not the same as a tech founder who could potentially make generational wealth if one particular outcome is realized.
I don't disagree, but "he has inventive to say X" doesn't mean "what he says about X is wrong" It's a fallacy, we should attack the argument, and not the person. This person also very clearly mentioned all of this (in the "sources" section), this is not some underhanded opinion piece.
Having said that I am strongly anti-passkey so I don't need any convincing, but I prefer technical arguments.
Thank you!