Users don't like social login
identity.mozilla.com
identity.mozilla.com
I use Persona on my costs-real-money subscription site[1] and I'm very happy with it. Integration was easy, the user experience is pretty good, and it's been stable and reliable. The best thing, of course, was not having to implement my own password-management infrastructure, which saved me a ton of time, as well as insulating me from the hard security problems that come along with such a beast.
If you decide to try Persona, I heartily recommend it. There are a couple of gotchas to be aware of:
1- On iOS, only Safari works due to Persona using a pop-up window for login. People using Chrome on iOS will get a confusing "relay frame not found" error.
2- Signup flow could be better. When users create an account, they get a confirmation email. Clicking the link in that confirmation email redirects them to the Persona site, not back to your site. It's possible this is configurable and I haven't figured it out yet.
3- Persona emails are case-sensitive. There's some rare issues that occur as a result. At one point, it could crash the login, but I believe that's been fixed.
Don't let these flaws stop you, though--Persona is very well done and constantly getting better. I've had hundreds of people sign up for paid accounts and only two have had trouble to the point of asking for help. (And nobody's cancelled their subscription because of login problems. :-) )
[1] Let's Code Test-Driven JavaScript, letscodejavascript.com
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/navigator.id.re...
> returnTo: Absolute path to send new users to after they've completed email verification for the first time. The path must begin with '/'. This parameter only affects users who are certified by Mozilla's fallback Identity Provider.
Of course, if you find anything we've missed, please file a bug :)
Upgrade to the Observer API (`.watch` and `.request`) and your users will automatically get a super smooth post-verification experience, just like you described.
I like it a lot, but at the end of the day I'm still relying on a single company to hold the keys to many accounts of mine on the web, which is still a bit jarring (not that it's going to stop me).
Actually, with Persona, you're not. :)
Persona has a fully decentralized architecture. The centralization you're seeing right now is completely temporary, and only serves as a bootstrapping convenience. If you own your own domain you can turn it into a Persona Identity Provider and start minting your own identity certificates today, without Mozilla (or any other single company) being forced into the trust path.
Awesome, good to hear. I saw the thing about Identity Providers and got excited, but then I logged in and was like... aww..
So, hopefully Google will be doing it soon with Gmail/Google Apps!
I'll submit a feature request to Spotify to get them to support Persona log in. When Gmail and Spotify are gone I'll be two big steps closer to getting rid of that pesky Facebook account ;)
EDIT: Oh, can I help beta test it?
Perhaps I'm missing something.
In short: it's bog standard public key cryptography. My browser has a keypair and my email provider has a keypair. My public key and email address are bound together and signed by my email provider's private key. When I want to log into a site, I pass along that certificate. I also pass along a document containing where I want to log in and and the current time, signed by my browser's private key.
The latter document ties a given login request to a specific keypair. The former document ties a given keypair to an email address.
Together, they identify me and prove that the person logging in really is the same person that was authenticated by the email provider.
perhaps an additional field: Email: [_____________] Confirm Email: [________________] Subscription: $24.95/Month (after free 7-day trial)
I tend to be suspicious when the price isn't at least as conspicuous as the biggest/boldest text.
Example: http://www.roadreadycertified.com/
I'm limited by a serious lack of graphic design skill, and this page wasn't part of Primate's original design work for the site. It shows. :-) It will get a proper design at some point in the future.
Just as a point of info "only two have had trouble to the point of asking for help" is a really bad way of judging whether something is working well or not for your customers.
The vast majority of people do not complain if they hit problems. They just silently go away. From my experiences of optimising this sort of stuff I'd pretty much guarantee that you have at least 10x times than number failing and walking. Possibly much higher.
By the time they get to the "create Persona account" part, they're already invested in it working.
I also monitor my logs for signs of trouble. One of the two issues I was talking about above was actually initiated by me reaching out to the subscriber. (I happened to see them bouncing on the "now log in" page within a few minutes of their subscribing.)
And I also ask people who cancel why they did so. The vast majority respond, and none have said "I couldn't log in." :-)
It's quite possible there are still some angry silent unsubscribers who were stymied by Persona, but at this point I'm satisfied that it's not a significant number.
But you do realize it does definitely create another, much more serious, security problems right? What happens when the single sign-on server gets compromised? What happens when tokens aren't as secure as they should (like the recent OAuth SNAFUs, with an 's')? What happens when you don't pay attention to all the fineprints in the Persona docs stating things like:
"Be careful if you don't do this it's going to be easy to forge"
and:
"Guidelines to use Persona securely"
?
So it can be used not securely? Like OAuth? Do you think I find it re-assuring that I have to take steps so that things are not easy to forge? What when the latest JavaScript / browser exploits manages to forge requests?
Don't get me wrong: this seems very convenient. But you're trading time for something here. It saves you time by now having to roll your own security correctly (a DB into which you put emails and bcrypt encrypted passwords) but it comes at a price.
The price is the added insecurity that single sign-on adds.
As far as I can tell, using Persona requires less attention to security than doing it myself. I don't see how that translates to creating "much more serious" security problems.
Perhaps you are a security expert who can do a better job than a team of Mozilla developers who are dedicating themselves full-time to solving authentication problems. I'm not. I know enough to know that security is harder than it looks, and that even if I salt my fries and crypt my bees, I can still screw things up[1]. Better to outsource it... well, as much as I can, anyway.
[1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...
Persona has a federated architecture. In the very near future, most users will not be vouched for by a central authority.
> bcrypt encrypted passwords
Don't forget to upgrade everyone to scrypt when that recommendation changes.
So long as you specify your origins properly and properly check the response from their verification service, it's perfectly secure.
I'm also happy to answer questions in-thread or via email.
The proliferation of sites that only or primarily accept social logins seem to suggest that it's not a sound premise. However, I'd be interested to know if you guys have some data that's not shared in the article that suggests it is.
> The proliferation of sites that only or primarily accept social logins seem to suggest that it's not a sound premise.
I'm not sure that necessarily follows. Google's own advertising for G+ authentication touts its privacy features, which suggests that Google also believes that users are uncomfortable with social auth as it exists today.
(Anecdotes aren't data, but they're what I have on hand at the moment. Sorry! Still at PyCon.)
And again, autocorrect makes someone look the fool.
I'm a developer on a e-commerce site, when we started out we assumed what Persona assumes, that email is a unique and stable identity. We found out the first day of production mode that this assumption is flawed. People changes email address all the time, it's at least as unstable as their home address, most peoples phone number is more stable.
As software developers we assumed that pretty much no one would ever change their email address, or that at least they wouldn't discard their old one. Regular people however do that. They do not care about their email address.
Is this something that the Persona team that given any thought. If so, what did you come up with?
"Within Persona, your identity is your email address. You can use as many email addresses as you want, but you still only need one password.". - https://login.persona.org/about
However I think it might still confuse customers. A normal user expect to be able to change their email address on the site where they do business and the "MAGIC". I think we would have been better of requiring a username, email and password, rather than using the email as the username. For a large number of people needing to have both username and email seems redundant and stupid, for real life customer... not so much.
My issue is, a customer has X number of orders on our site. Then he/she changes email and expect that using the new email address the old orders are magically available. This seems naive but that is what you have to deal with.
Again I should check to see if Persona indeed maps multiple emails to the same identity. It didn't seem like it when I tested it last, but I would not rule out that I did something wrong.
You can let users change email addresses, and nothing bad will happen. They'll just have to log in with the other address next time.
On the other hand people do change identifiers. They change usernames (jsmith gets married and now wants to be jadams) and they change emails (for the same reason, or because they change ISPs or mobile carriers or whatever). ANY authentication process you use should allow the user to change his identifier (or any other personal attribute even gender) at will.
Internally you deal with this by connecting the identifier to an other token that is the real "permanent" identity for the user in your system. But it's one that's never exposed to the actual user. It sounds like your system was using the email address in the order records to identify the customer. That is what your real problem is, not that people change email addresses.
Why not expose it to the user? Because then they'll want to change it? Are you talking about browser fingerprinting?
We already expose this on the user/email level, where users can link and log in with as many email addresses as they like, under one account (identifier).
People do not believe that their email and identity is in any way linked. You and I might believe that, but don't count on your customers sharing your beliefs.
I think that you might have to explain that a bit.
I think that others try to argue that people use email at least as temporary identity, in the sense that at time t, they identify themselves with at least one of their email addresses. In practice this is enough for many web sites to use the email address as login. Perhaps you are talking about some longer sort of permanence, or uniqueness?
The main exceptions to this are:
1. People who share an email address for convenience, like my grandparents.
2. Group-facade email addresses, like support@whatever.com, which may be routed to several people.
3. Email addresses that don't belong to anyone, like "noreply@whatever.com", or "autogenerated-4b243efa37e5b013a1d90b694c3bcaa3@hell.com"
Even Facebook uses email for login, as does google and just about every other website I use.
It's an interesting and bold statement that needs some supporting eveidence and explanation.
Yes, it does: it means that you cannot count on it as a canonical form of identity for any long period of time, as people expect to be able to change it; in fact, many people go through "the great purge" every couple years, deleting their e-mail address and selecting a new one, in order to purposely reboot the people who have their address: to them, it is a way to purposely restart their identity.
You thereby have to think of e-mail addresses as more akin to your home address. If you ask me to log in with my home address, yes, that works: it doesn't work for everyone, as not everyone in the world has a home address, but the same thing can be said for e-mail addresses. Sometimes people will share a home address, but surprise surprise: sometimes people share e-mail addresses as well.
When I am asked to log in to that form with my home address, and it works, you now might claim I've accepted it as part of my identity. Well, I haven't: I'm going to change my home address at some point, and someone else is then going to start living here, which is exactly what happens to many people who use ISP or University -provided e-mail. Hell, it also happens to people with vanity e-mail addresses if they let their domain registration expire (as happened to one of my friends, who otherwise was using the same e-mail address for a very very long period of time).
Yes: it works temporarily, but it isn't my identity, and eventually it will fail, and unless you are really really weird (like, you are the kind of technology person who would probably consider it digital suicide to allow their domain name to expire, and has had the same e-mail address now for well over a decade), it will fail sooner than later, and may even fail on purpose when users invalidate it.
Of course you should be able to change the email on an account. Usernames can also be changed and are far from canonical. Your point about emails is not invalid, it's just not addressed by usernames, and usernames are actually inferior in that respect.
So, I did not use the word "username" in that comment you are replying to. I thereby will assume you mean "stable and opaque identifier assigned and chosen by the authentication provider", which is what I would argue for (as opposed to attempting to rely on an e-mail address as a stable identifier).
I did use the word "username" in a response to someone else, but that was a very different (and much more abrasive :() argument path.
> Regardless email addresses are more stable and unique than usernames.
E-mail addresses are not more stable that usernames, because e-mail addresses have an external purpose: they receive e-mail. Many people actively go and change their email addresses periodically in order to stop receiving e-mail from people they previously were receiving e-mails from.
A "username" (your word here), especially (and maybe specifically) the "good" kind that is never shown to another user and is just used for account canonicalization, which conceptually could be a random number assigned by the system, is something that the user has no reason to change unless they actually want to never log in to the account again.
E-mail addresses also are tied to the DNS system, which other forms of identification need not be: you can instead tie them to a private key kept by the authentication provider. That would make "me" be A@B where A is a number and B is a key pair. In this way, even if the way you continue to contact my authentication provider lapses (such as attempting to use a hostname) only if the new owner has the same key are they able to claim the identities there (unlike e-mail) and as the user specifier is opaque (not a string that I'm going to care about and want to make pretty, or something I'd ever want to change unless I actively want to lose access to my account) it will not run afoul of the problem with e-mail where people feel compelled to reuse them after some time of abandonment.
The problem then with Persona is that it is the websites consuming it who have the onerous job of dealing with every possible e-mail address change a user may request. With more classic attempts at federated login, users may end up with multiple authentication providers that can become somewhat confusing, but they demand to change authentication providers and especially lose access entirely to authentication providers sufficiently rarely that it is a non-issue to handle the support load of helping users remap their accounts (something that is difficult to automate, of course, in the case where the user already lost access to their old identity). With Persona, this is now something that the user has to do when they change e-mail addresses at every site they may ever have logged in to using their account, ever. :(
"Why Does Amazon.com Allow Multiple Accounts With the Same Email Address?"
http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/11/why-does-amazoncom-a...
"Note: If you change the e-mail address on your account to an e-mail address that is already associated with another Amazon account, we will ask that you first verify your e-mail address."
-- http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
- Many people never abandon their primary identity email.
- But many other people often abandon their email identity.
- You don't want to use a social network as the gatekeeper to *your* site.
- You don't want to have human support for password resets.
Also, to the extent to which this becomes important, it only becomes important too late, as in after you've already used an address or two. I have had the same address now since 1997 when I registered saurik.com, but I did that because I had in the two years prior "learned the hard lesson" that my ISP-provided e-mail address was doomed to be something I'd end up having to move off of, potentially fairly often.
"Everyone else is doing is doing it that way" isn't a reason to do it that way, especially for a product, like Persona, that is supposedly about fixing what is wrong in what everyone else is doing.
No, it doesn't.
> At any given time, an email account is probably linked to only one person.
Lots of people have shared email accounts. And even without that the "at any one time" is one reason why it doesn't work as an individual identifier, its not stable. (Since cell phones and number portability have become ubiquitous, phone numbers are probably better than email addresses at this, but share the same sorts of problems.)
> 2. No alternative exists, in real world use, that really looks better
Sure alternatives exist. While its often important to have a contact email address connected to an identity, there is no reason to have an externally-meaningful value that is inextricably tied to the online identity, particularly if that value doesn't have an intrinsic, unique, and stable link to a particular person.
You're justifying choosing a bad natural key with the argument that its the least-bad natural key, when not only is the proposition that the proposed key is the least-bad natural key somewhat dubious, more importantly, the use case calls for a key, but there is no reason for it to be a natural key.
Of course it has to be a natural key! Are you expecting that users will learn your theoretically perfect surrogate key? Do you understand that you will be competing for space in people's brain? For what reason? Because shared email accounts break the many to one relationship on mail <-> person?
I'm not sure why users should ever need to know the key.
> Because shared email accounts break the many to one relationship on mail <-> person?
No, I probably wouldn't even both with addressing the problem of shared email accounts (which would require some discriminator), but with one person having multiple email accounts and email accounts changing over time. These things indicate that accounts should have transitory, one-to-many relationships to email addresses, rather than email addresses serving as a key.
The only requirement for the email to be a key to the account is the association of one email to one person. A person can have more than one email, at different times or at the same time. The only thing that can't happen is one email mapping to two individuals. Full circle: the majority of emails do map to one individual and the cases where they do not map, are not enough to preclude the use of emails as keys.
Perhaps the confusion occurs because you think I'm defending email as a primary key for the account. I'm not. It's one key, not the primary key.
It's a hard problem because anything real world like a identifying number is flawed for anonymity. There needs to be a unique identifier for a web entity.
It's always annoyed me that solutions like persona etc are approaching this by simply replacing email, when shouldn't they be abstracting my online identity? I hold several "personas" throughout various sites, email addresses, and applications. However, I don't want a product that simply merges them, I want a product that is more of a "meta-persona", that lets me easily track, manage, and expand them.
"It maps multiple emails to the same identity, in that you use the same password to log in with all of them. The end site gets the email you log in to the site with (I can log in to Persona with email A but let all sites know email B every time."
So based on that, if you want to expose three different identities to 3 different sites, you can set up Persona to do that automatically, without having to remember the separate emails and passwords you used for each one. I guess the only problem would be if you needed multiple separate logins to the same site, but unless it's your own site, presumably that should be rare.
If a user does change their email they can log in as their old email and simply update their account to their new one.
Email is a much better system than username because people constantly forget the unique username they created for that specific site. You don't really forget your email very often.
If you're stupidly using your email as your username then your email becomes public should the site you're on show, at any point, your username.
Which is why sites correctly done use the email for login but display a username and never your email. Correctly done sites also forbid username from containing '@', so that you can be sure that people don't do anything retardedly stupid like using their email as username, which would be displayed publicly on the site...
It was one big mess not at all worth it. I'd like to try Persona and see how that compares, but I think normal email/pass is better than plain social auth.
Technically that's easy to implement.
Real people (non-tech / nerd) prefer not having to create individual accounts for all sorts of different services.
I've seen proof of this time and time again.
Lowest friction wins.
I really do wish that people would at least offer something other than a single method for us that don't like linking together everything though.
https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-...
There are obviously hundreds of variables in play here from the content of the site to the fundamental design that may be influencing this.
So really, just a data point:)
At this point our total users is in the hundreds so who knows how it'll turn up.
Yep - it's definitely just a data point.
A very small, and probably very uninteresting data point: I wouldn't sign up - if you'd only allow login through "social media" accounts.
(I would however, if you offer Persona or regular sign-up username/email accounts though)
Here is a presentation on one of their recent studies https://air.mozilla.org/online-identity/
As a disclaimer, though, I've worked on highly specialized apps where the users belong to a certain organization bound by one of the above. For example, I made a website for my school and every student there has an email address that is tied to that school's Google Apps for Edu account, so I'm guaranteed that all valid users (students) will be able to log in via Google.
This reminds me quite vividly of Stack Overflow's login page. I can never remember if I signed up direct, with OpenID, or Google, or whatever else is there.
I've been starting to dig Mozilla and Firefox again lately (the last week of developer tools news cemented that), so I'd love to see their idea take off and gain full adoption.
Of course, if you think Mozilla is on the right track, ask a site you use to support Persona. :)
https://bitbucket.org/djc/persona-totp
In particular, the authentication method I use is Google Authenticator-compatible TOTP (RFC 6238).
"We built the Persona protocol to reduce data sharing to the minimum needed for the user to easily log in: the browser mediates the login without leaking data to the identity provider. In the end, Persona is the easy login solution that respects users."
Ben is a smart guy, I've read about Persona, and it seems to be really well thought out and to have learned from the failings of e.g. OpenID. I intend to use it the next time I need an easy login solution for users.
Not tied into Google/Yahoo/Facebook/MyLittlePonySocial - but not having to create a new account. Oh, and I own the data (Not the AppData of course though).
And that's the way I like it :)
We did it in a way that's completely independent of our normal email/password login as well, but integrates seamlessly. That made me really happy, as the reliability of our system hasn't decreased a bit.
The Persona team was also really helpful, though it turned out we didn't need much help implementing it.
Users are allowed to have multiple emails tied to one Persona account. If they login to my site with one email I will see that email address and can bind their account data to it. If they sign in with their other email address, will I be able to identify them as the same person?
The problem with Persona is that they simply don't seem to understand that for real people, email addresses are just a convenience, not a canonical way to maintain identity. They also fail to see that even people like myself, who have carefully tended an email address for well over a decade, are not immune to this problem.
I have previously commented on this here:
Facebook is one identity provider. I'm not comfortable having all of the Internet, to use a reduction to the absurd, dependent on Facebook. Persona is distributed, which is, for me, a primary requirement for an identity system.
In the case of the e-mail address, you are moving it to the person providing the domain name the e-mail address is on; this is thereby explicitly why I brought up OpenID--which you seem to have totally ignored--as it is also a distributed system but yet it doesn't force the incorrect assumption that Persona does (specifically, that e-mail addresses are canonical identification mechanisms for users, and so nigh-unto encourages opaque tokens to be returned).
Let's put this another way: you seem to believe that there is a way to assign a token to a user in a way that works for them no matter where they are. I believe that that entire concept is a fantasy. In particular, I believe the one that Persona chose, which you seem to want to defend, only works for a very weird subset of users that are technical enough to understand that others make this incorrect assumption, and then organize their lives around it.
In comparison, once you assume that there is no such identifier, you start asking how you federate the choice, and you end up with the idea of "identity providers". However, you now have no stable way of holding on to identity as you change providers. I maintain that is an unsolvable problem, and it should be treated as an unsolvable problem: the concept of an identifier that can cross multiple identity providers is, again, a fantasy.
So the result is that you now have to ask the question of what identifier is used within an identity provider. I maintain that e-mail addresses are a horrible horrible choice, as they are known to be something that the people who provide them are known to reuse, and they are things many users want to be able to change often. Instead, it should be encouraged to make the token entirely opaque, with a requirement in the spec that "this token will never get reused by any other user using your identification provider ever in the future". AFAIK, OpenID states exactly this.
And yet, when I go to log in to a website using OpenID, I can select Google as my authentication provider, and then log in with my e-mail address. Later, when my e-mail address changes, I'll be able to log in with a different e-mail address, and Google will assign me the same OpenID identifier for my federated login with other websites. You end up in a similar boat if you use the various OAuth flows that other companies use, such as with Facebook, then using an API to get the stable identifier (which for Facebook is a number).
Look: I maintain a website with tens of millions of worldwide users, and I only have federated login. I deal with the issues of federated login day in and day out. I deal with users from very diverse user communities, and I see how they treat their e-mail addresses (as sadly, Google will not let you change your Gmail address without getting a new account, so a lot of users are forced into situations where their identification changes when there was no real reason why it should have been required). When I look at Persona, all I see is a support nightmare due to a fundamentally invalid assumption.
Your central point is that, for a given identity, there is a set of emails that map to that identity (N-1 relationship). Moreover, this set is itself volatile, as people add and remove emails to the set that maps to their identity.
There is no relation of one person to one email (it is one to many). This was approached during the discussion, and I believe you agree that this is not an issue.
There are cases where the relation of email to person is one email to many people. This was approached during the discussion, and it just invalidates the usage of group emails as identity identifiers (stuff like info@example.com). It does not preclude the concept of email as identity identifier. I believe you agree.
Where you have a specific point against the usage of email as an identifier is on the fact that the email is volatile. Volatility is a flaw, which must be worked around, but it's not a showstopper. Further, there's absolutely no evidence that a pure identity provider, such as OpenID, wouldn't be as volatile as email. It does not have the scale needed to prove non-volatility yet.
I think we agreed on the point about natural/surrogate keys.
We then briefly touched the question of identity provider (up to here the discussion was about the identity identifier). I think we agree that the provider must be distributed, hence your reference to OpenID (albeit the reference to FB, which I think was related to the point about natural/surrogate keys).
Briefly, in summary:
- The identity identifier must map one identifier to one identity. (ok for emails, ok for OpenID, ok for most auth providers such as Google or FB)
- The identity provider must be distributed. (ok for email and OpenID, ko for Google, FB and other social networks). Social networks are not acceptable because they are not distributed enough. Were there as many social network providers as there are email providers, on a on open ecosystem, where users could run their own social network on their own domain, social networks would be acceptable.
- Identity identifiers must be memorizable by users.
And here, on this last point, is the crux of our disagreement. You are of the opinion that, since emails are volatile, users will forget their previous email, or discontinue its service, and will be locked out of access to their indentity on services tied to the email. I am of the opinion that users will never remember (or include in their daily routine) yet another identity identifier (the OpenID URL, or any other identity specific service).
The fact of the matter is that space in consumer minds is limited (heck, marketing is a whole field of study on grabbing a share of consumer mind). Being limited, you have two options:
a. Aim for the ideal scenario, go for OpenID or other pure identity provider, aim for theoretical perfection, and risk no adoption because users can't be bothered to use it; or
b. Use the one identity that already exists, that users already remember, that almost fits the bill, and work around volatility, the only big hurdle, by having the ability for users to change/add/remove emails (identity identifiers) associated with each account. This is the approach of Amazon or Linkedin, for example.
Aiming for a), while theoretically optimal, introduces the failure scenario of users going for the other identity that already exists in their daily routine: Facebook/google accounts. This is a catastrophic scenario.
Optimum is often the enemy of good.
Look: You brought a smile to my face with the reference to a tens millions of users site. It's a vain appeal to authority. I also manage a tens of millions of users site, with both federated and native authentication.
This is for two reasons: first, because they are tied to the DNS system, a system that is subject to political and economic issues. Tying the namespace of users eventually to the DNS system means that if a domain name is lost and then owned by someone else, that they are now in control of the identities of everyone associated with the domain name.
There is no reason this needs to be the case: a sane federated identity system, in my book, would solve this by tying identities instead to a private key that is stored by the authentication provider. Thereby, if the authentication provider goes out of business, their key would be lost, and would not be reassigned to anyone willing to pay $12.
Secondly, your fundamental disagreement is about the ramifications of a bullet point I never agreed with (as opposed to, seemingly, about whether we see eye-to-eye on that bullet point): I do not believe that identity identifiers must be memorizable by users, I believe that only the presentation identity must be memorizable by users.
To demonstrate the difference, I am 116098411511850876544@google and 3614794@facebook. However, despite the fact that I log in to numerous external websites using these authentication providers, I have only at occasional times remembered the shorter Facebook number, and I have never remembered (nor do I believe I would ever remember) that Google number.
Yet, all I need to log in is my e-mail address. Yes: I end up using my e-mail address to log in. However, the concept of my identity is not stored via that e-mail address: that's just one of the many things associated with my account at the authentication provider, and it will change over time. I could use any other identifier, including crazy ones like "what were the last three things you did on this website, and give us a list of at least five of your friends" (which is similar to something Skype once used to verify that I was the owner of my account when they thought it had been hacked by someone trying to steal my credits).
In fact, despite being one of those weird tech people who have actively avoided changing my e-mail address in nearly ever, I actually have changed my Facebook e-mail, as originally Facebook was for students only. Therefore, my account was originally connected with saurik@umail.ucsb.edu.
However, I later changed my account to be attached to saurik@saurik.com, which I consider to be "mine". Then, at some point later, long after I graduated, UCSB removed my access to my old student accounts, and I'm pretty certain will happily give them to others. Of course, this means that for any website that considers e-mail addresses to be related to security or where it can be considered a canonical store of identity (although I maintain that this second category is actually very rare: only Persona seems to make this mistake) that I may have forgotten to go find and update, I'm now screwed: someone else can access my account.
Now, when I log in to Facebook to third-parties that I previously logged in to, they still work. They still work, because Facebook, unlike Persona, did not ever use my e-mail address as the canonical definition of my identity. None of the tons of websites out there that I've ever used Facebook with ever even saw saurik@umail.ucsb.edu, and if they did it was metadata associated with my account: it wasn't "my account".
This is a critical detail. The different is enormous, and is especially noticeable due to the way Persona is designed, where you don't even really need an active third-party to manage your identity, and are instead supposed to be able to just magically use any e-mail address: some e-mail addresses would suck even worse than others (example being my UCSB address), but any e-mail address is something that is volatile.
You need that middle-man, even when you are federated such as with OpenID (or via OAuth with random APIs for identifiers), in order to isolate the volatility of e-mail addresses from the people handling federated login. Otherwise, you end up in federated hell, where every time a user changes their e-mail address instead of contacting one party, they have to contact every party, defeating the entire point of single sign-on.
To take a concrete example of this, I received a support e-mail from someone saying that they are changing their e-mail address redacted12323@gmail.com (yes, with a random 5 digit number at the end) to redactedqredacted93@gmail.com. As Google internally does not understand this very argument that e-mails are something people want to be volatile refuses to let you attach or move around Gmail accounts to Google account identities, this means that their identity on my site changed, and I had to reassign them. I did this, and seriously two days later (today) I received an e-mail saying that they have lost access to redactedqredacted93@gmail.com and now want it to be redactedqredacted94@gmail.com.
In contrast, when a user changes their Facebook username (which is equivalent to changing their Google username, and changes their @facebook.com e-mail address similarly to their @gmail.com e-mail address), they don't need to even think about how this affects other websites, as Facebook doesn't map e-mail addresses back to the identifiers that they return: they return an opaque number. This is glorious: they get it; they make the value of federated login actually be a benefit for users and for websites. Some entities in the system (and not just one: hence how Facebook, Yahoo, and Google can all provide this service) can thereby specialize in maintaining and controlling identity, and other entities in the system can spend all of their time consuming identity.
This means that the user has to do less work, and the website has to do less work: win/win. In your scenario, where the e-mail address is canonical, the user has to go to every single website and update their identity, and the websites have to provide systems to let users do this (which isn't even something that cleanly automates given that almost every time people bring this kind of issue up to me, it is because they no longer have access to the old account, and thereby can't use it to authenticate at my site anymore).
At this point, you might now argue that "well, that's OpenID, and OpenID failed". First, it isn't clear why it failed: Yahoo claims from user studies that it failed because the UI for it was so horrible, and that made a lot of sense to me. They even recommended a potential solution to that problem, and its a solution that I don't think is inherently worse for anyone than Persona. It certainly isn't clear, however, that Persona makes any sense. I in fact just tried to use Persona, and I found it horribly confusing; and in the end actually haven't succeeded in logging in to the website in question (at some point in the flow I seem to have caused a persistent error that now won't clear). It certainly was more complex than using "classic" federated authentication, and it seemed like that complexity was directly related to the website in question having to go further out of their way than they did with previous solutions to abstract the identification tokens (my e-mail address) from my account.
Finally, my point about the tens of millions of users was not in regards to an appeal to authority: it was a defense to the actively condescending tone of your "sorry", which I found to be downright belittling and inappropriately unrelated to my arguments (hence the "look" at the beginning of that clause). That "sorry" you added is a rhetorical construct that does nothing other than to annoy your opponent (hence my repeating it back to you in quotation marks for emphasis to demonstrate that "I noticed"). Think of it more like you patting my head and going "kid, I don't think you understand" in an attempt to turn my youth into an argument point, and me feeling the need to say "look, I'm over 30, I'm not a kid anymore". I found that "sorry" so bothersome that I will be honest: I was downright shocked when you were willing to even go down a point-by-point argument rather than just turning more rhetoric back at me; I was absolutely certain you were just going to flip me off again in your reply to my further-argued comments, although I guess I sort of feel you did anyway by calling me "vain"... :( I am not certain why you feel like belittling and insulting me directly (as opposed to my arguments) is a logical argument path :(.
Anyhow, I now fully understand your position. I still maintain my point, and further discussion would only be useful if accompanied by beer. All in all, it's the ever present tug between theoretic perfection and real world constraints. It's doubtful this back and forth would ever reach an acceptable compromise.
This is very important when you're trying to build an identity system that you want every website to adopt. Users want to split up their lives into distinct identities (e.g. one for professional settings, one for friends, one for family, one for a secret hobby...). A viable identity system should allow people to manage such identities with ease and switch between them at a moment's notice, without letting anybody else find out that @lubujackson on HN is the same person as @blowjobs on a porn site or a member of an unpopular political movement. Even if somebody carefully compared HN databases with the porn site databases.
Having said that, people do change their email addresses a lot more frequently than web devs assume. When this happens, they need to update their profiles in every single website where they used the old address. It would be better if my identity were linked to some sort of key that doesn't change, rather than an email address. Likewise, if there is a proliferation of Persona identity providers, some of them will inevitably go out of business after a while. It should be very easy to migrate one Persona account to another.
Not sure how that makes this a better product overall. Can anybody clarify?
What's more, Persona is built as a fully-decentralized architecture with a temporary centralized fallback. That means that one button can support all users, via their email provider's native authentication mechanisms (in the future) or via Mozilla's centralized fallback (for now).
The main issue as I see it is just the baggage that comes with a private company login. For instance, Facebook login raises questions about what Facebook will do with the login information, and also what the site will try to do with your Facebook data and permissions. Those questions will increasingly become a concern for everyone, but beyond that some people have opted completely out of Facebook because they find it actively harmful and so they are excluded a priori.
Persona is simply a login mechanism with the users interest in mind. People may take or it leave it, but it will be on its own merits rather than being overshadowed by needlessly related general concerns with a third-party product.
https://github.com/PADL/gss_browserid
Internet Draft here:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-howard-gss-browserid-00
This lets you use Persona to authenticate to non-web services such as IMAP, SMTP, SSH, NFS, CIFS, etc. We (or should I say, I) are pretty excited about it!
Context: Personas should have been renamed to "Themes". But apparently it's not done yet.
After all, Buffer is for posting on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so it only seemed logical that our potential users would be able to quickly and conveniently sign up using one of their existing accounts."
Social logins might be OK if you are making a photo-sharing app or a social newsreader, but if your business relies on _companies_ signing up, my suspicion is people won't be comfortable signing up with their Facebook account.
We wanted the benefits of a secure login system without all the social baggage. Persona provides that. Though we also support Google OpenID as lots of people already have a GMail or Google Apps account.
As an aside, I won't sign up for _anything_ using Facebook, I simply don't trust them or the app not to broadcast my every move to people.
This said, I really wish Persona project will fail as much as possible.
I only hope there'll be a day I'll finally truly possess my own network identities, and third parties (social networks, email providers, etc) will act as notaries who just assert them for others to verify.
If you have your own domain name, that's exactly what Persona does. The protocol is completely decentralized. Mozilla only provides a fallback for domains that don't support Persona.
One just can't own a domain name. It only can be leased for a limited time, for a price, and even then, at least in some TLDs one can't be sure the lease won't be revoked at someone's whim. There's no real difference whenever one leases email address from a provider or domain name from a registrar.
Maybe I'm overzealous about it, but I really wish to be the source of my own identity and posess it like I posess my GPG key.
I had high hopes of seeing data and research (no offense, TechCrunch) to support this claim. I'm in the camp of not liking social authentication, especially when it's the only option, but I'm also a sample set of 1.
I am generally suspicious of sites that require or "encourage" logins with social details.
At least that's what I've seen in user testing... but that's not as interesting I guess.
Just put auth info in a cookie, and let the user associate it with an e-mail address later, once he actually knows he will keep using the service.
I believe "I can't be arsed to register" is one of the top reasons websites lose prospective users.
That has to cost a lot of money. With the dozens of ways you can authenticate with StackExchange, I don't know why I was surprised to learn I had previously created an account without actually creating an account, but it was so.
Also, anyone who reads Korean can tell me if this says "sorry we're closed"?
I've tried to participate in their "meta" site, but the pedantic and condescending tone there is even worse than it is on the main sites.
date of close : 2013-02-27
Call me paranoid, but I think "deleting" your account has the potential to actually do more harm than good, since in doing so you are voiding any agreements or terms that you had previously agreed to, including those that promise not to sell or otherwise abuse your info.
eg messages to myrealemail+mytag@gmail.com will always be received by myrealemail@gmail.com
I too have a domain with catch-all, and I do that rather than using the + notation, but it's something you can teach your friends who would never do that.
I'd never want to depend on that for anything, it's really just a novelty; a simple regex will nullify any effect you'd gain for using that.
Yeah, I'm counting on e-mailers to send mail to the address I give them. No, I don't expect folks to send me spam unsolicited, or sell my address when I give it to them. I don't consider my name or e-mail address to be secret, and I'm also counting on anyone who sells my contact info to be doing it in bulk, not paying enough attention to strip out +tags, and by passing the address to spammers unaltered (or losing control of their database), give themselves away when I start receiving spam at that address.
Honestly I don't use the feature very often and I had not considered it to be a security measure before. Maybe novelty is the right word.
If I give myaddress+dropbox@mydomain.com to Dropbox, and they mail me from different addresses, I would be able to catch them all and put the "Dropbox" tag on them all, rather than having to make a filter for *@dropbox.com or some other extraordinary measure for classifying their mail.
It's part of the RFC, and supported by every mailer that I know. What part of this technique seems like obfuscation?
So, if you only use +tag for your own personal organizational purposes, then have at it! But if your goal is to conceal your account ID with Google in the interest of personal security, then you really need a better angle.
On a related note, some spammers have really done a number on me. First they impersonated thousands of addresses at my domain in the form of xxxxxx@mydomain.com where x is a hex digit. This is despite me having DomainKeys and SPF enabled. So not only did I get a lot of bounced spam to my catch-all, the spam that went through ended up in places that other spammers picked it up as a valid address so now I am getting spam sent to those randomized addresses.
At first I figured I could put together a rule to block all hexadecimal address of six digits but it turns out that at least another round of spammers started using the full alphabet and variable lengths.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to need to include a cookie in the addresses I use - so instead of dropdox@mydomain.com and amazon@mydomain.com it will be something like DOQ.dropdox@mydomain.com and DOQ.amazon@mydomain.com - addresses without the cookie get binned. But that's not going to help with all the addresses I've used over the last 15 years, and haven't kept track of.
It's like making you buy a car without allowing you to take it for a test drive. At least the reasons for photocopying your license before taking a test drive are understandable.
If the email address entered on our checkout page is already in our database, we link that purchase to the relevant account. If the customer want to login, they can, if not, that's cool to. We get a lot of wrong matches which needs to be fixed, but that seems to be a price we can and will pay.
We have had customer adding orders to other people accounts, because their email address was entered wrong ( even though we require the customer to enter the email twice. ) and we have customers ending up with multiple account that we need to merge. Despite all the problems, customers love not having to log in before doing a purchase. It's hit and miss in a few cases, but we try to do what our customers expect, matching their purchase to their account, regardless of login credentials. That's what consumers want.
Now that I've seen this in practice, it would be my preferred way moving forward. It didn't/doesn't take that much effort to do things this way. The bigger issue is in the occasional phone order our demographic is mostly men 50+, so some genuinely don't have email.. we use an internal address in that case...
A login is a continuation, or a state/session key. So is a link/URI. There's no need for a mandatory "account" just to be able to pick up where you left off, even if it's to continue checking your email. (Though one could opt-in to further "protect" pages with passwords, biometrics, non-invasive mucus swab samples, and so on...)
Did 20th century humans think key rings were too complicated? Why are we implementing tokenization, one way hashing, etc. when the end customer can do this much more securely? Oh yeah, we'd like to get at their data when they're not around..
Schneier wrote a long time that anything too complex cannot ever be secure. That's the case of OAuth and of many federated/unique/single sign-on logins.
Most of the website, do not just ask Email. Most ask other info too, like my DOB, full name, Other Profile information. And when I say I "do not use", I am talking about the first time logins of course. I don't really know what kind of a website it is, legit or just a vapour. And I do not know in advance what information it will ask.
Take the example of The Old Reader, till recently they wanted to take control of your Contacts too(along with Reader; now they don't). I knew it once I was at past the Google SigIn page(and I aborted right there). It was frustrating even for those few seconds. Many do this.
So, I have given up on them altogether.
I mean I have OpenID accounts set up especially for this with the data I would like to provide for this. There Mozilla's Persona(it's Identity Management System)- etc. Why not use these?
And do not even get me started on Facebook. I don't open a website again if the only way to login was via Facebook. Paranoid? No, rather pissed off. (By the way, whenever I tried using Facebook logins the above mentioned problems surfaced only in bigger multitude).
Just because you use OpenID and Persona doesn't mean that the majority of people will. But the majority of people will have a Gmail account, or a Facebook account.
The biggest problem has actually nothing to do with social: the problem is security of all these single-sign on / unique ID.
We're in 2013 and hardly a day goes by without a major security exploit found affecting Rails, Java, OAuth, Flash, etc. There are so many botnets out there that sites we rely upon for our daily workflow are getting taken down (GitHub)...
Yet people don't talk about security. They don't even mention it. Not in the TFA. Not in this thread (besides two insightful comments).
As long as people will keep thinking that they can put all their eggs in one basket online and "really really have this basket by hyper-secure" we're gonna be in big trouble.
It doesn't help that several people on HN are selling snake-oils products "put all your passwords in this unbreakable app, we guarantee you nothing bad could ever happen".
That's why Persona is based on a federated protocol: it's designed to spread your eggs across many baskets, and it even lets individuals bring their own basket.