this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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Privacy
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Personal anecdote to illustrate: the last time I tried creating and using passkeys for my Google account, I got the impression they (Google) would only accept keys coming from either Google Authenticator (their 2fa smartphone app) or something like macos's built-in keychain. No way to give them a key generated using a local, offline service that I could store however I want - it needed to be accessible using, basically, a big corpo['s software] as the intermediary. This coming from how their website would request the keys from my browser (which means mozilla seem to be in on it as well :/).
Given that I currently use a pure file-based password manager that I can move around and switch the keys for as I please, the current state of passkeys feels like a step back in terms of allowing me to control my digital identities.
It sounds like your browser is not hooked up to your password manager. I’m not sure how you want it to work if the browser APIs the website needs don’t have the required plumbing.
That does not mean the standard or Google have locked anyone out of the ecosystem.
I dunno, the browser could open a file picker and let me point it towards the passkey, or perhaps let me paste the key contents into a field?
It's been several months since I looked into it, so maybe things have changed since, but I don't see why the browser has to be hooked up to my password manager through a mechanism that seemingly can't be user-piloted nor user-intercepted. How does a browser API require some external third-party software to be installed and configured to work?! It's a public/private key pair at the end of the day, right? Not some novel algorithm, protocol, or whatever. Why can't I simply tell the browser "here is where my existing passkeys reside; place any newly generated ones here as well"? Or perhaps "here is the program to call and here are the arguments to supply when you need to create and/or retrieve a given passkey"?
I don't think I have claimed the standard itself is locking anyone out - let me correct that if I did. I have just not found a way to not be locked out of the feature itself in the products of big players like Google - my Google account(s) being the one service where I feel like I could actually benefit from using passkeys over passwords (not to mention one of those I have seen pushing the "replace all your passwords with passkeys!" messaging).
To be specific, my password manager is http://passwordstore.org/, ("the standard Unix password manager").