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Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

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Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#121
post #6

Is the perception that we will be nefariously ingesting your private data? Or that FB auth is just a trend? Or just a mistaken assumption that all users actually have a Facebook account?

To me it just seems retarded to assume that everybody have a facebook account - especially when OpenId was invented to solve this exact problem.

And guess what, a facebook account is also an open id.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never bothered to sign up at stackoverflow because of OpenID. Not necessarily because I have some philosophical issue with it, but because I already have a system to maintain this stuff and OpenID is just another hoop to jump through. Adding an optional user/password signup is hardly difficult.

Honestly, I'd rather not give Jeff my password. So +1 on OpenID.

What's stopping you from setting your password to jeff_sucks? It's pretty memorable too.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#123
There are two points you need to remember, one, a huge percentage of users have facebook accounts and use them regularly, the hacker news audience is a small minority of people who don't want to use facebook; and two, facebook's new graph api can easily give you very simple and quick access to viral marketing by spamming your your users' feeds while also providing you with a fairly substantial amount of data about your users. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but its definitely a strong motivation for a lot of companies using facebook logins and facebook widgets.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#125
I am starting a new site and want to avoid authentication.

In our system, two users are linked together for the purpose of our service. We do that via unique URLs. Do you think it is safe to match up emails for authentication.

i.e. when user 1 wants to get his profile, he has to input his email and his partner's email. If he fails to do that then we do not pull up the profile. Does this make sense and do you think it is secure enough?

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#126
post #97
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's impractical about it ? I'm very comfortable with separate identities per-site. If your site isn't worth a separate identity, why am I interacting with it in the first place?

Well, for one thing, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem: http://www.xkcd.com/792/ Yes, it's a ridiculous example, but the vast majority of end users keep the same username and password for all of their online services. Obtain one U/P pair and you could conceivably access their identity anywhere. A centralized, specialized authentication provider could maintain multiple levels of authentication depending on what…

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Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#127
post #125

I am starting a new site and want to avoid authentication. In our system, two users are linked together for the purpose of our service. We do that via unique URLs. Do you think it is safe to match up emails for authentication. i.e. when user 1 wants to get his profile, he has to input his email and his partner's email. If he fails to do that then we do not pull up the profile. Does this make sense and do you think it…

It's pretty insecure. Beyond the obvious "I know both people and their emails and that they use this service" it would be trivial to do company email attacks (IE: all employees use (first-initial)(last-name)@(companyname).com so if I have a list of employees I can quickly access all combinations of those employees).

No idea what your service is about and if that level of security matters.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#128
post #125

I am starting a new site and want to avoid authentication. In our system, two users are linked together for the purpose of our service. We do that via unique URLs. Do you think it is safe to match up emails for authentication. i.e. when user 1 wants to get his profile, he has to input his email and his partner's email. If he fails to do that then we do not pull up the profile. Does this make sense and do you think it…

Secure enough for what? The attack is simple: pick a target whose email you know, and then start guessing emails of people you think they might have an account with. This could be as easy as browsing to a website and entering pairs of emails addresses listed on the "About Us" page, or ripping through a person's Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

It might be fine for completely non-sensitive data, but for anything else, probably not.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#130
post #86

I recently integrated JanRain into a client's site and I think I will be using it for future personal projects. It handles all the OAuth/OpenID details while providing Facebook/Twitter/OpenID/LinkedIn/Yahoo/Microsoft Live/Google/Wordpress/and more providers. I would like to give people the Facebook option, but I myself, don't use it unless I have to. Giving a dozen options via JanRain makes that easier.

We've used JanRain as well, they do a nice job of abstracting away some of the differences in the platforms, making it much much easier to support more options.
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