All these days we have been told to have a strong password with special characters, numbers and alphabets to make our online accounts impregnable and keep the hackers away. Such a strong password can be very irksome as people tend to forget them, making them go for a password reset.

Google says no more tricky password business. Welcome to the world of ‘passkeys’ – or special numbers that are used to access your GPay or your banking apps. It asserts that the passkey system is more secure and much faster to get into your Google accounts.

“To use passkeys, you just use a fingerprint, face scan or pin to unlock your device. Google says it will be 40 per cent. faster than using passwords. They rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure,” top Google executives said. 

The next time you sign in to your account, you’ll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins. 

The digital services company has started offering a button called ‘Skip password when possible’ option, which you will soon see across all your Google accounts. 

“Earlier this year we rolled out support for passkeys, a simpler and more secure way to sign into your accounts online. We’ve received really positive feedback from our users, so today we’re making passkeys even more accessible by offering them as the default option across personal Google Accounts,” Sriram Karra, Senior Product Manager, and Christiaan Brand, Group Product Manager at Google, said in a blog post, announcing the new change.

How to use passkeys

But while they’re a big step forward, we know that new technologies take time to catch on — so passwords may be around for a little while. That’s why people will still be given the option to use a password to sign in and may opt-out of passkeys by turning off “Skip password when possible.”

No headaches

“We’ve found that one of the most immediate benefits of passkeys is that they spare people the headache of remembering all those numbers and special characters in passwords. They’re also phishing resistant,” they said.

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