I don't like passkeys
I don't like passkeysBy Ethan Hawksley18th September 20264 min readFor the past few years, the tech industry has kept pushing passkeys as the ultimate solution to logging in. Many Big Tech companies “helpfully” inform you every time you sign in how much easier and effortless passkeys are. Since they are bound to the site they are created for, they cannot be phished by a hacker’s fake login screen.
- ▪I don't like passkeysBy Ethan Hawksley18th September 20264 min readFor the past few years, the tech industry has kept pushing passkeys as the ultimate solution to logging in.
- ▪Many Big Tech companies “helpfully” inform you every time you sign in how much easier and effortless passkeys are.
- ▪Since they are bound to the site they are created for, they cannot be phished by a hacker’s fake login screen.
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Record
| Original publisher | Ethan Hawksley |
| Canonical URL | https://hawksley.dev/blog/i-dont-like-passkeys |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:06:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T12:43:45.849Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T12:43:45.849Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | c441qvmqGToL · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I don't like passkeysBy Ethan Hawksley18th September 20264 min readFor the past few years, the tech industry has kept pushing passkeys as the ultimate solution to logging in. Many Big Tech companies “helpfully” inform you every time you sign in how much easier and effortless passkeys are. The only way to make them stop is either to concede and set up a passkey or dig into the settings to find the off-switch.Google goes as far as to name the setting “Skip password when possible” (opens in a new tab), and Microsoft advertises that you should make your account passwordless (opens in a new tab).Passkeys are a fantastic technology. Since they are bound to the site they are created for, they cannot be phished by a hacker’s fake login screen.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ethan Hawksley.
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