Google underlines its commitment to passkeys with new updates

Google launched its passkeys initiative on 2022's World Password Day and this year it's marking the day with some new updates.

It’s expanding Cross-Account Protection, an initiative where Google will share security notifications about suspicious events on your Google Account with the non-Google apps and services you use. Doing this will allow the other apps and services connected to your Google Account to use the security information to better protect your other accounts.

It's also going to extend passkey use to its Advance Protection Program (APP), which looks to safeguard users who are at the highest risk of targeted attacks. This is important in an election year, with growing cyber threats and the rise of technology like AI. Users will have the option of using their passkeys as a sole identity factor or along with a password.

In addition to allowing users to store passkeys on their security keys, independent password manager vendors, such as 1Password and Dashlane, are now using the passkeys management APIs on Android and other operating systems.

Google also shared some metrics on passkey adoption. They've been used to used to authenticate users more than a billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts. In the past year Amazon, 1Password, Dashlane, Docusign, Kayak, Mercari and Shopify have all started rolling out passkeys. They join early adopters like eBay, Uber, PayPal and WhatsApp. Dashlane says it's seeing a 70 percent increase in conversion with passkeys and Kayak users are signing in 50 percent faster.

You can read more on the Google blog and create a passkey for your Google account here.

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