75% of People Are ‘Aware’ of Passkeys, But Are They Actually Using Them?

The organization behind passkeys and other post-password authentication methods wants to retire World Password Day. Not because it’s one of the dreariest concepts for a holiday possible, but because they want to rebrand it to “World Passkey Day.”

The FIDO Alliance (FIDO being short for Fast Identity Online) announced this recasting alongside a study showing encouraging stats for passkey adoption. 

The top-line figure: 75% of people surveyed in the US, China, Japan, South Korea, and the UK are aware of passkey technology. That’s a significant bump from the 57% of respondents to an October FIDO survey who called themselves “familiar” with passkeys (though you would expect that more people would be “aware of” something than “familiar” with it).

Worldwide, the survey found that 30.6% of respondents had enabled passkeys on at least one account, while 38.4% had enabled passkeys on every account they could. The figures for the US alone are 42.8% and 23%, respectively.

The stats shared for other countries sometimes diverged dramatically from that pattern. In China, for example, 66.6% of respondents had enabled passkeys wherever possible, while only 28.6% had enabled passkeys on at least one account. In the UK, the corresponding figures were 38.6% and 26.2%.

Asked about that apparent inconsistency, FIDO spokesman Jack Hayes wrote that the survey only allowed respondents to select one answer from the five possible: “Yes – I have enabled passkeys on all accounts that I can,” “Yes – I have enabled passkeys on at least one account,” “No – I have chosen not to enable passkeys,” or “I don’t know.”

“It is possible that the most appropriate answer for a respondent falls into the ‘all accounts possible’ category, and they opted for that response over ‘on at least one account,’” he wrote. 

Other survey results suggest how many people might still be asking “What’s a passkey?” (Short and oversimplified answer: a cryptographic credential that your device generates and presents to a site in response to its challenge for authentication. This call-and-response requires you to authorize it, usually via biometric authentication, and can’t be fooled by a phishing scam site.) 

For example, while 24% of respondents said passkeys are “far more secure than passwords” and 29.2% chose “more secure,” 22.2% chose “I don’t know.” And while 26.6% rated passkeys “far more convenient than passwords” and 26.8% chose “more convenient,” 21% picked “I don’t know.” 

The survey results come from a SurveyMonkey poll conducted online on April 13 and 14 among 1,389 adults aged 18 and up, selected from the almost 3 million people already taking SurveyMonkey polls. FIDO’s presentation notes a “modeled error estimate” of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The FIDO presentation further notes that the organization checked the top 100 sites and found that 48% of them support passkey authentication, and it touts the organization’s launch of a Passkey Pledge in April that has since drawn support from more than 100 companies and organizations. 

But even while passkeys have become a standard feature on many cloud services, support for them can get much thinner in other sectors of the computing business. And in some non-computing industries (US airlines, we’re talking about you), support can be so thin that you can imagine chief information officers of those firms saying, “What’s a passkey?”

About Rob Pegoraro

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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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