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This Week in Identity · Issue 1 · 2026-06-20

This Week in Identity, Issue 1

Welcome to the first issue of This Week in Identity, a short weekly digest from the Start with Identity community. We read the week's identity and security news so you don't have to, link to the original sources, and add a line on why each one matters. Free, independent, no sponsorship.

This week was dominated by passkeys, with a milestone number, a Linux expansion, and a reality check.

The big number

An estimated 5 billion passkeys are now in active use worldwide. The FIDO Alliance put the figure out on World Passkey Day 2026, alongside research reporting near-universal awareness of passkeys among consumers and enterprises. Why it matters: awareness and provisioning are no longer the problem. The remaining work is activation and account recovery at scale. Sources: FIDO Alliance: Five Billion Passkeys, FIDO Alliance: Accelerating Global Passkey Adoption

What else happened

  • Amazon shared customer passkey data. Amazon reports 465 million customers now using passkeys, with sign-in it describes as roughly six times faster than passwords. A useful datapoint on consumer-scale adoption from a single large retailer. Source
  • RSA extended passwordless to Linux. FIDO-based, phishing-resistant sign-in is coming to Linux servers, developer workstations, and infrastructure that has long leaned on passwords. Workforce passwordless beyond the laptop is where a lot of the hard, high-value identity work sits. Source
  • Confidence is outrunning reality. A new FIDO Alliance and HID study, The State of Physical and Digital Identity in the Enterprise, finds a widening gap between how secure enterprises believe their identity posture is and how it performs day to day. Worth a read if you are building next year's roadmap. Source

Worth thinking about

FIDO Alliance CTO Nishant Kaushik wrote on building a trust layer for agentic payments, where AI agents shop and transact on a person's behalf using verifiable intent. As agents start to act with delegated authority, the identity questions (who authorized this, for what, and how is it proven) move to the center. Source

From the community

  • New: a vendor-neutral IAM jobs board. Browse roles worldwide, or post one free.
  • We're recruiting volunteers: news curators, jobs scouts, country ambassadors, and more. A few hours a week, credited by name.

That's it for issue 1. Subscribe to get the next one, and send tips or corrections through the contact form.

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