The FIDO Alliance announced Facebook has been appointed to its board of directors, according to a press release. 

With this appointment, Facebook joins other leading global technology, financial services and e-commerce board members in driving the alliance's strategic vision to reduce the world's reliance on passwords with stronger, simpler authentication.

The FIDO Alliance develops specifications for interoperable strong authentication with compliant mobile and web applications and PC platforms. Through its use of on-device public key cryptography and convenient authenticators such as security keys and biometrics, FIDO Authentication is meant to be more secure, private and easy to use than passwords and other forms of strong authentication.

"Weak passwords continue to cause unnecessary problems that could be avoided if strong authentication options were more widely deployed and used," Brad Hill, Facebook software engineer, said in press release. "We are proud to join the FIDO Alliance board and help them in their goal to make simple, strong authentication more broadly available through web browsers and on mobile and PC platforms,”

While new to the board, Facebook has played an active role in supporting the adoption of FIDO Authentication since January 2017 when they made it possible for any of their 2 billion daily users to use a FIDO-supported security key to log in.