The tech industry is currently in the middle of a rather gradual security transition from usernames and passwords to passkeys.
Passkeys are far more secure as online services don’t store your username and password, but Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that the use of Face ID and Touch ID has an additional benefit …
We’re almost at the 10th anniversary of an opinion piece I wrote, calling for Apple to extend the use of Touch ID. That of course happened, but the pace of the shift from usernames and passwords to passkeys is still rather glacial.
With passkeys, a website asks you to prove your identity and your device activates Touch ID or Face ID in response. It then sends back confirmation that you are who you say you are and advises that it has used biometrics to verify your identity. Crucially, it doesn’t share the login data with the website itself.
That’s far more secure for users, but Huffman told the TBPN podcast (via Engadget) that there is an additional benefit. Unlike usernames and passwords, passkeys confirm the presence of a human being.
“They actually require a human presence, like a human has to touch, or do or look at something, so that actually just proves there’s a person there.”
That’s important to Reddit because the company has been trying to fight a flood of bots on the platform without compromising its position that it doesn’t want to know the identity of its users for privacy reasons.
“Part of our promise for our users is we don’t know your name but we do want to know you’re a person,” Huffman said.
The company’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian seemed to misunderstand how the tech works, however.
Ohanian said on X that “I just don’t know how to sell face-scanning to Redditors.”
If Reddit were asking its users to submit face scans, that would indeed be a concern. But the whole point about Face ID is that none of the biometric data is ever shared with the app or online service. All they receive is confirmation that the device has verified the biometrics of the user.
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Image: 9to5Mac/Apple
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