> As of October 2025, passkey login has been fully rolled out and is now required for members with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Reimbursement Accounts (RAs) who use the HealthEquity Mobile app and web experience.
https://help.healthequity.com/en/articles/11690915-passkey-f...
The FAQ is a little misleading by saying WHEN your account has a passkey this and that, but reality is that after October they made them completely mandatory, no bypass, no exceptions. 100% coverage.
Oh, and by the way, passkeys have been broken on PC/Linux when using Firefox for months:
> There Was A Problem: We encountered an error contacting the login service. Please try again in a few minutes.
Neat. You have to use Chrome or Edge.... For months, after making it mandatory...
That article does say "HealthEquity Mobile and web experience" so maybe it's just for customers who use both, I only use web.
This is the biggest myth/misconception I see repeated about passkeys all the time. It's a credential just like your password. If you forget it, you go through a reset flow where a link is sent to your email and you just setup a new one.
And if it happens to be your Gmail account that you're locked out of, you need to go through the same Google Account Recovery flow regardless of whether you're using a password or a passkey.
There are also many exciting new ways you can lose your passkey that wasn't the case with a password you can remember in your mind. The person you responded to is worrying about big tech randomly banning you and making you lose access, in the meanwhile I'm mostly worried about losing the physical device containing the key. I don't think I will forget, say, my Google password unless I got Alzheimers or got hit in the head by a hammer, at which point I will have bigger problems than a lost Google account.
And let's not pretend account recovery process is always smooth and easy. They may require evidence from your other accounts you cannot access now due to the key loss. They may demand government IDs that might have been lost alongside your device. They may also just deem your recovery attempt fraudulent and ban you for no reason (which I similar to the scenario the post you are replying to desctibed.)
Personally I don't really trust companies to not do a whoopsie and permanently lock you out when you lose credentials. Especially when the company is big or hard to access in person.
For someone like me who already uses a password manager for everything, passkeys seem to add no security while reducing usability and control.
One advantage of passkeys is that they’re phishing resistant. They’re bound to the website that you created them for, it’s impossible to use them for a different website.
Instagram does something similar. If you have no logged in device and you reset your password, good luck getting in, cuz it wants you to log in a device "it recognizes" else it won't let you log in.
It's super sad to see all kinds of websites offering you to add a passkey when you log in.
An open, cross-platform passkey implementation does all that too, and on top of that prevents you from accidental password leaks via logs, MITM etc. by default.
> It's super sad to see all kinds of websites offering you to add a passkey when you log in.
As long as they're not forcing you to add one, what exactly is your problem with having more choice?
Personally, I am grateful for every site that doesn't require my phone number to sign up and uses passkeys for authentication instead, yet I also don't want SMS authentication banned for everybody since I understand it currently works better than Passkeys for many people.
Is this a mistake? I am already using password manager and totp for my accounts, but I am tired of dealing with passwords.
Even when using a password manager (bitwarden in my case), it just get tedious bringing out my phone, starting auth app, locating the correct account, reading 6 digit token and logging on.
My plan was to continue using bitwarden for passwords as well, but more as a break-glass mechanism that I really use. I want to use passkeys mostly for convinience.
Isn't it why good practice is to bind at least 2 hardware passkeys and/or have recovery codes?
Sure someone can steal your phone/laptop/yubikeybio but then you can use the NitroKey you have at home in your drawer to recover your account.
Backup keys and recovery codes also do not solve all cases of key loss. One thing I worry about is what happens if I am traveling in a foreign country and loses my belongings. In the past if I can convince someone to let me use his computer I can at least log into my email account as long as I remember my password. If everything is passkey then I will be locked out of all my online accounts until I make it back home, assuming that I have actually properly set up the backup device and keys. Humans are not very good at making sure that backups actually work.
Is it? Maybe I'm in a bubble but feels like most people I know unlock their phone with biometrics. Sure few do that on their laptop, even less on their desktop, but I imagine that explaining it's "like unlocking your phone" would help those very numerous people (if you have metrics on biometrics on phone, please do share, genuinely curious) see that it's basically doing what they already do on more devices.
Assuming your 2FA tokens are generated by phone, of course. But I think that's by far the most common way.
It honestly takes a minute to add a key and it's just that, a physical key.
IMHO what's risky in terms of UX and habits is precisely that most workflows do not highlight this. So people rightfully are scared of losing that 1 precious key, so they don't activate 2FA because of that. Meanwhile if the UX when they activate 2FA would clarify that they only have 1 key stored, adding a 2nd one or saving codes (most do propose that option for 2FA authenticators but not hardware passkey AFAIK) is what will make them both safe against attacked but also against their own accident (shit happens) then maybe behaviors would change.
Anyway, yes, you're right, most people don't do that or aren't even aware of it but arguably as more and more important and intimate part of our lives are online, it becomes crucial for one owns sanity to better understand how this all works.
Even for this, for grandma, this is probably still asking for a lot.
Grandma's bank will have a recovery option even if she's tossed her phone, computer and hardware token in the ocean, and then had a stroke which made her forget any passphrases or whatever: You can call the bank and physically authenticate yourself with a passport, driver's licence or some other ID. It's a bitch to do, you may have to go to an actual bank branch, but grandma will get access to her money again. Meanwhile, her access to physical mail doesn't stop just because she's forgotten some passphrase or lost her phone.
Even techy people get caught out by Google forcing 2FA, while casuals don't even consider the possibility of losing access to their email. While both the rhetorical you and grandma both should probably have a bulletproof recovery option for their email, since it will be the foundation of their digital identity, getting them to acknowledge the problem is going to be hard, and the solution, paying for a Yubikey or some other house of cards solution, is a tough sell.
But didn't the author hint that this could get blocked?
My general read on passkeys and their implementers is that exportability is seen as a risky feature, and there's a push to make it as opaque as possible, likely through attestation or similar mechanisms.
[1]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407
Then don't use Apple's/Google's/whatever Gaia is as your passkey provider?
> Mom can't figure out what they are or how to use them.
Then do something nice for your mom and set her up with Bitwarden, 1Password or KeepassXC, which prevents the platform lock-in.
> It's one further step down the attested hardware software and eyeballs path.
None of the synchronized passkey implementations, which big tech has been pushing lately, support attestation, so this is just FUD.
Yubikeys do, but fortunately they don't seem to have the (non-enterprise) weight to make it mandatory for all passkeys.