"In contrast, even though you keep insisting otherwise, Security Keys don't give "escalating amounts of personal information to tech companies" but instead no information at all, just that useful answer to the question, "Are you still you?"."
No, I am responding to the above assertion that I have insisted security keys give esacalating amounts of personal information to "tech" companies.
This is incorrect. Most users do not have physical security tokens. But "tech" companies promote authentication without using physical tokens: 2FA using a mobile number.
What I am "insisting" is that "two-factor authentication" as promoted by tech campanies ("give us your mobile number because ...") has resulted in giving increasing amounts of personal information to tech companies. It has been misused; Facebook and Twitter were both caught using phone numbers for advertising purposes. There was recently a massive leak of something like 550 million Facebook accounts, many including telephone numbers. How many of those numbers were submitted to Facebook under the belief they were needed for "authentication" and "security". I am also suggesting that this "multi-factor authentication" could potentially increase to more than two factors. Thus, users would be giving increasing amounts of personal information to "tech" companies "for the purposes of authentication". That creates additional risk and, as we have seen, the information has in fact been misused. This is not an idea I came up with; others have stated it publicly.
Whilst you're clearly much more comfortable with your "Facebook are bad" line, the problem is that this isn't the thread about how Facebook are good actually, this thread was about your completely bogus claim about Security Keys:
> This ignores the possibility that the company selling the solution could itself easily defeat the solution.
I'm sure you really are worried about how "Facebook are bad", and you feel like you need to insert that into many conversations about other things, but "Facebook are bad" is irrelevant here.
You made a bogus claim about Security Keys. These bogus claims help to validate people's feeling that they're helpless and, eh, they might as well put up with "Facebook are bad" because evidently there isn't anything they can really do about it.
So your problem is, which is more important, to take every opportunity to surface the message you care about "Facebook are bad" in contexts where it wasn't actually relevant, or to accept that hey, actually you're wrong about a lot of things, and some of those things actually reduce the threat from Facebook ? I can't help you make that choice.
No, I am responding to the above assertion that I have insisted security keys give esacalating amounts of personal information to "tech" companies.
This is incorrect. Most users do not have physical security tokens. But "tech" companies promote authentication without using physical tokens: 2FA using a mobile number.
What I am "insisting" is that "two-factor authentication" as promoted by tech campanies ("give us your mobile number because ...") has resulted in giving increasing amounts of personal information to tech companies. It has been misused; Facebook and Twitter were both caught using phone numbers for advertising purposes. There was recently a massive leak of something like 550 million Facebook accounts, many including telephone numbers. How many of those numbers were submitted to Facebook under the belief they were needed for "authentication" and "security". I am also suggesting that this "multi-factor authentication" could potentially increase to more than two factors. Thus, users would be giving increasing amounts of personal information to "tech" companies "for the purposes of authentication". That creates additional risk and, as we have seen, the information has in fact been misused. This is not an idea I came up with; others have stated it publicly.