Google Touts Passkey Successes, Expands Account Protections

It’s World Password Day, and Google is celebrating by expanding its support for passkeys and other account protections across its offerings.

“Passwords are often at the core of today’s major cybersecurity issues, which is why we’ve continued to create new authentication technology over the years,” Google vice president Heather Adkins writes in the announcement post. “In 2022, for World Password Day, we launched passkeys. Today, we’re proud to announce that they have since been used to authenticate users more than 1 billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts.”

I feel like I’m responsible for at least 1 million of those authentications, but then I’m a lot more active in the passkeys space than most. But in addition to this milestone, Google is also announcing improvements to its support for passkeys and some other account protections.

For starters, it will soon let customers use passkeys to enroll in its Advanced Protection Program (APP), which safeguards high-risk users like political campaign workers and candidates, journalists, and human rights workers, instead of requiring a security key. Google is also expanding its Cross-Account Protection program—which currently protects 2.4 billion accounts across 3.4 million apps and sites—to include other companies that run non-Google apps and services.

Google also points out that third-party password managers like Dashlane (which I use and recommend) and 1Password have leveraged its password management APIs in Android and are seeing nice adoption.

“Dashlane is seeing a 70 percent increase in conversion with passkeys and Kayak users are signing in 50 percent faster than before,” Google notes. “In just the last 12 months, Amazon, 1Password, Dashlane, Docusign, Kayak, Mercari, and Shopify have started rolling out passkeys, joining early adopters like eBay, Uber, PayPal and Whatsapp.”