Facebook Makes Big New Move to Capture More User Data | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Makes Big New Move to Capture More User Data

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34 pointsAnon8424 comments

Making your user registration dependent on your compliance with another company's terms of service seems like a ridiculously unnecessary risk.

The reward is one-click sign-in for 500M users. If you're an instant personalization partner, zero-click sign-in for 500M users.

To have zero-or-one-click sign-in for half a billion users is a useful feature to have. Just keep your own login system if all else fails.

I pretty much stopped reading after this line: "Web development thought leader Jeff Atwood...". That and the press release-type of comment above it.

And I agree with everyone else here. Trusting your users to Facebook is a dumb-ass thing to do.

Totally agree. Who made him thought leader? His rise to fame is like Newt Gingrich in the 90's. He isn't great, but amassed a huge following.

But too bad every other website owner that wants a few extra users will do what facebook decides.

All under the watchful eye of Facebook, a company that leads the world in online identity and specializes in user data security. It's a very smart move, but raises questions about the company's growing power.

I honestly can't tell if the author is saying that tongue-in-cheek or if it's copied from a press release.

Indeed. I have no confidence in Facebook's authentication of people... in what way do they verify that people are who they claim to be? Do they require a credit card number? A driver's license number? ANYTHING verifiable at all?

That's no worse than most site registration systems. Banks aren't going to use Facebook logins anyway.

"... in what way do they verify that people are who they claim to be? ..."

The authentication isn't perfect but it's contained in the social graph itself. My use case is not normal but is in keeping with the original intent of Fb of only friending those you actually know and meet. With the exception of 1 or 2 persons, every one on my contact list is someone I've know for a long time.

It's not foolproof, but you can validate people by who they are connected to, assuming they are RW connections not OL connections. Real people tend not to friend, non people.

They're starting to require mobile numbers/credit-cards. Seems to be only happening for newer accounts at the moment(?)

It's all fun and games until all of your users are locked out one day because facebook isn't happy with you or has decided to enter your space. http://www.lamebook.com/

It's bad for the website. It's bad for the user (versus, say, an independent universal id). All of this because you don't want to use a password manager and are frightened about hackers? Meh.

It's all fun and games until someone sends WikiLeaks the full details of their data sharing/mining a week before the IPO.

Google is more used than Facebook by Janrain users.

FTA "Facebook is gobbling up user data left and right, that's the price for the power, convenience and security the company's identity services offer"

I consider that price far too high. If your site looks like it just crawled out of an odesk freelancer's bitbucket, then I will give it a dummy email and random password because I do not trust your site. People need to be acutely aware of sites they can trust and then adjust their behaviour - not simply give everything to Facebook and assume its taken care of- because its not.

I agree with you. Many sites out there are not to be trusted. However, not everyone is like us. If they visit a site, and there's a required registration, with the form already pre-filled, they'll simply click the 'Register' button. It's easy, slick and fast.

Users get scared when a site asks them to login via Facebook or even Google. If this is the only option you offer, registrations will suffer a lot. I don't know who would use this.

I'm curious - do you have any data supporting this? I see it on HN based on anecdotal evidence (or none) all the time. It would obviously have different effects on different market segments, but I would love to see some analysis on this.

No hard data, just lots of complaints when I tried it.

I'll provide my personal input, if a website requires a Facebook account to log in, I won't do it. I have the Facebook Apps platform turned off for a reason.

I'm very unlikely to sign up for a new site if it doesn't allow login with My Google account via OpenID. I'm sick of making up new passwords and keeping track of them.

For some mass-market sites, scaring off those paranoid, nitpicky, self-righteous users could be a winning move.

Let's say I have a Facebook account, I will use it to access all sites I use, Facebook deletes my account for a reason(which may be political) and I loose all my info on all these sites.

This sounds like an even greater risk to me.

And then goes down....

This could affect Facebook in a negative way. Think about big sites that get spammed with tons of fake email user accounts. Making Facebook registration the only option, these spammers will be forced through Facebook first, which just hurts Facebook. (Or do they want that so they can report a larger than accurate userbase? heh)

I think Facebook wants that problem – but not to inflate their user numbers, rather to become better at pruning their system, improving it as the one true-life identity authority.

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