Most of your online accounts are protected by a username and a password. Unfortunately, login credentials are under fire recently with security flaws in popular password managers that leave users exposed with their personal information strewn across the dark web. What if there was a better way? There is. You just probably haven’t heard about it yet. Big Tech actually invented a much more secure solution with passkeys, but many websites and apps still refuse to use them.What are passkeys?Depending on how closely you keep your ear to the internet, you may or may not have heard of passkeys. These are digital credentials attached directly to your user accounts. Passkeys are a replacement for passwords, and they don’t include any letters, numbers, or symbols for users to jot down or remember. They exist simply as encrypted lines of code in your devices that permit access to your accounts on request.The benefits far outweigh the hassle.From a user perspective, passkeys are convenient because they don’t require the user to remember their password or even reset it in the event the password is forgotten. Instead, they use the biometric sensor embedded on your device — whether that’s facial recognition or fingerprint authentication — or the lock screen pin to verify your identity and complete the login process for any supported app or service.From a platform holder perspective, passkeys are more secure than typical login credentials, and they’re much harder to hack. Simply put, passkeys can’t be stolen or leaked like typical passwords. They live on the host device — not in a password database — and require user authentication, meaning that a hacker would need to physically possess the user’s device and know their lock screen pin to access the passkey-protected website.On the downside, passkeys are a little tricky if you use multiple device platforms. For instance, passkeys saved to Apple Passwords are stuck in Apple’s ecosystem, while keys created for Google Password Manager are saved to Google, and keys for Microsoft Password Manager are saved to Microsoft. Big Tech is supposedly working on an interoperable solution to share keys between platforms, but for now, you’ll need to create multiple passkeys for supported websites on every platform you use.Getting to know (and use) passkeysPasskeys soft-launched across Apple’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s platforms back in 2022 and 2023. For our purposes, as you’re very likely to use one or more of those platforms, you should focus your passkey energy there. Each of the big three companies offers a simple walk-through to set up passkeys for your Apple account, Google account, and/or Microsoft account.However, here in the year 2026, passkeys are not nearly as prevalent across the web as the three companies expected them to be. Web developers, app makers, and service providers have to choose to support them; otherwise user accounts will default back to the usernames and passwords we know all too well. So far, this hasn’t happened.RELATED: The latest iPhone security threat has a nasty fix Moor Studio/Getty Images There’s even a website that explicitly monitors and calls out the top 50 sites online that do and don’t support passkeys. Top names like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon all offer passkey protection, as expected. However, Instagram, Netflix, and Spotify are dubiously missing the feature. As it stands, 36% of the top websites online still don’t have passkey support, and there are countless others outside of this purview that have dragged their feet. The question is why.There are plenty of theories around why some websites still don’t support passkeys. For starters, it takes development time and money to switch away from legacy login credentials to the passkey system. Second, the lack of interoperability between device platforms is a potential headache for users that website owners may not wish to navigate. Finally, some sites may also believe that switching to passkeys simply isn’t worth the trouble when passwords are effective enough; in other words, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.Should you use passkeys?In a word, absolutely! You should definitely use passkeys on every account that supports it. The benefits far outweigh the hassle of limited multi-platform support. Plus, when you consider that password manager hacks, breaches, and leaks are on the rise – like the one Dashlane suffered earlier this year – passkeys are a simple, yet effective way to keep your accounts safer in the age of AI scams and other cybersecurity threats.
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