Ask HN: Why do I have to Login to the websites ?

3 points·31reasons··4 comments

What problem does the Login mechanism solve ?

Is it possible to get rid of it ? What can replace it ?

How long will it take when we no longer have to login to use a service?

I think we will always need some way of logging in to websites that deliver personalised content. The login mechanism needs to be able to identify the current user to be able to do this.

There are many ways for this to be achieved eg: username/password, Oauth, some form of secret key.

I don't think we can completely get rid of a login mechanism completely, but it may be possible to hide this from the user.

Face or speech recognition could be used, but I don't really like that idea. I guess a chip/rfid tag could be implanted into the body, but somehow I don't think most people would want to be identified in this way.

Bit late answer...

I think technically it will be possible to let the user provide and store the data needed to have a personal experience at a website, it should be not that hard.

You should be able to either provide an address to your data or the data itself in the calling phase of a request to the server at hand, if we choose to change the protocols of webserving.

However I have a feeling that the whole enterprise world will fight with all power to make it not happen.

One way to replace it, would be that when you sign up, you provide email. The website sends you a private link. And you always use that link to log into the website. Instead of typing in the address into your browser, you'd type it into your email client and get that link, and click on it.

The problem it solves is maintaining data privacy

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