“It’s very, very significant,” Andrew Shikiar, executive director of the FIDO Alliance, tells Wired magazine. The FIDO Alliance is an industry group that develops authentication standards and has been promoting the use of passkeys. Shikiar called the move “an inflection point.”
“A company like Google enabling this with so many people actually seeing passkey sign-ins, they’ll be more likely to use them elsewhere,” he says.
Passkeys use biometrics, like a fingerprint or a face scan, to authenticate users. All of the major operating systems have adopted the necessary infrastructure to support passkeys. More companies are starting to offer it as a way to log in to their services, but none bigger than Google.
