Microsoft has been a major annoyance on me with passkeys. I don’t like not knowing for sure that I can get back into an account if any of my devices get fucked (authenticators are nice and I do have some things setup but always worry if my phone is broken or lost out of nowhere). They (Microsoft) have such a dark pattern way of pushing passkeys. When I have to help someone get into their MS account at work (normal consumer PC stuff not IT/corp stuff) which is already hard since the people I try to help already don’t tend to realize how important even simple things they don’t think about WILL fuck them later. Some examples are stereotypical “boomers” that default to adding their land-line when an account asks for a phone number, or that they were even making an account (another dark pattern from Windows 8 where sooooo many people created @outlook.com accounts without really paying attention).
Obviously I experience a higher than average amount of tech illiterate folks (that also seem to just not care like shit is still the Windows 7 and earlier times). But Microsoft pushes dialog prompts/boxes for physical security keys and passkeys in a way that at first seems like the person has one of those setup. In some cases trying to sign into an account without a passkey/security key it will do what I expect. Give an extra option to not keep using a password or password+text/email code, or setup passkeys to “not have to worry about remembering passwords”. Though I still think they don’t really clearly explain how crucially important it is to make sure the person’s information for the account is correct and making damn sure to know recovery options if anything happens.
But I started seeing just a box pop-up that looks like a system prompt that only gives two options. Enter your PIN/insert security key, or to use the authenticator app. No obvious option for picking that neither are setup. The only way for not using those is to click the X on the top-right of the prompt. In some cases I have seen people click on the options and it just acts like they are setup. Pick the authenticator option and it asks for the code on an app/device that doesn’t exist. In the cases that it does start the process of setting up passkeys, I still feel like they are trying to trick people into it rather than the users choosing to do it.
Again I deal with more than average “I’m not a ‘techy’!” kinds of people along with older folks. But it really does seem like any level of tech literacy keeps getting worse based on running into more and more people of all ages. Which is what freaks me out about how these things are suddenly seemingly pushed on folks at the worst moments. A lot of people first trying to setup their new device just want to get into it as fast as possible, and really don’t understand how they can just lose access to so many things they didn’t realize are now tied together. Let alone be aware that they should export those things to something that isn’t tied to the OS in the event they for some reason want to get something else (PC to Mac/Mac to PC/Android to iOS/iOS to Android/etc).
Microsoft has been a major annoyance on me with passkeys. I don’t like not knowing for sure that I can get back into an account if any of my devices get fucked (authenticators are nice and I do have some things setup but always worry if my phone is broken or lost out of nowhere). They (Microsoft) have such a dark pattern way of pushing passkeys. When I have to help someone get into their MS account at work (normal consumer PC stuff not IT/corp stuff) which is already hard since the people I try to help already don’t tend to realize how important even simple things they don’t think about WILL fuck them later. Some examples are stereotypical “boomers” that default to adding their land-line when an account asks for a phone number, or that they were even making an account (another dark pattern from Windows 8 where sooooo many people created @outlook.com accounts without really paying attention).
Obviously I experience a higher than average amount of tech illiterate folks (that also seem to just not care like shit is still the Windows 7 and earlier times). But Microsoft pushes dialog prompts/boxes for physical security keys and passkeys in a way that at first seems like the person has one of those setup. In some cases trying to sign into an account without a passkey/security key it will do what I expect. Give an extra option to not keep using a password or password+text/email code, or setup passkeys to “not have to worry about remembering passwords”. Though I still think they don’t really clearly explain how crucially important it is to make sure the person’s information for the account is correct and making damn sure to know recovery options if anything happens.
But I started seeing just a box pop-up that looks like a system prompt that only gives two options. Enter your PIN/insert security key, or to use the authenticator app. No obvious option for picking that neither are setup. The only way for not using those is to click the X on the top-right of the prompt. In some cases I have seen people click on the options and it just acts like they are setup. Pick the authenticator option and it asks for the code on an app/device that doesn’t exist. In the cases that it does start the process of setting up passkeys, I still feel like they are trying to trick people into it rather than the users choosing to do it.
Again I deal with more than average “I’m not a ‘techy’!” kinds of people along with older folks. But it really does seem like any level of tech literacy keeps getting worse based on running into more and more people of all ages. Which is what freaks me out about how these things are suddenly seemingly pushed on folks at the worst moments. A lot of people first trying to setup their new device just want to get into it as fast as possible, and really don’t understand how they can just lose access to so many things they didn’t realize are now tied together. Let alone be aware that they should export those things to something that isn’t tied to the OS in the event they for some reason want to get something else (PC to Mac/Mac to PC/Android to iOS/iOS to Android/etc).