Comment by nh2
5 days ago
> for a tech-stupid person
> password doesn't show up you know there's a problem
Here is your contradiction.
The normal person will just assume that some tech isn't working today again.
A key point of passkeys seems to be that it guarantees to the site owner that the user cannot be phished, without having to make assumptions on whether the user is tech-stupid.
"it guarantees to the site owner that the user cannot be phished"
Well gee how nice for the site owner.
Problem is my priorities are my absolute ability to never lose my most critical assets through some means outside my control, not the site's convenience.
It was ok to use imperfect systems back in the days when the bank and the store and even the government all had a desk a mile away you could go to in person and get anything cleared up and override all possible "usually it works like this" with your physical presense an drivers licence and birth certificate or simply 5 people who all attest they know you.
We no longer have that ultimate backup plan, so really F anyone's attempt to justify basically tricking people into doing something unwise that puts them at actually greater risk because their life is less under their own control, and doing this under the very banner of claiming to care about the users safety!
It's freaking amazing.
This is the rub for me. Passkeys are really about protecting the site and not the user. Its really designed backwards IMHO.
I don't know if they'd even be aware of how to copy the password out of the manager...
They have to be, because quite regularly password managers fail to detect properly user name or password fields, in which case you have to copy and paste by hand.
I've had that happen to me less often than sites simply being broken. If I couldn't copy-paste I'd be fine.
If someone only ever saved passwords from the browser UI they really could have no idea how to manually copy a password, while getting along fine.
It's not clear to me how a site can mess up a password field but not mess up a passkey prompt, though.