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AWS doesn’t know who I am

ben11kehoe.medium.com

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Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#81

Post by swinglock »

Terretta wrote: post #68
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My girlfriend bought an iPad for the kids to watch TV. It's shared by a couple of people. She had to log in with her Apple ID to set it up, and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid. Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user.

> Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user. Categorically not true. iPads in particular can be set up for multi-user with hand off. Shared iPad Overview: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mdm/cad7e2e0cf56/web Shared iPad for Education: https://developer.apple.com/education/shared-ipad/ Shared iPad for Business…

> Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organisation. Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organisation. Users with a Managed Apple ID can then sign in to Shared iPad, which is owned by the organisation. Note: Managed Apple IDs don’t support Family Sharing.

Practically not false.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#82

Post by kodah »

AWS doesn't deserve that kind of responsibility, no tech giant does. I'm surprised anyone would propose that without considering the consequences of this statement:

The richest man in the world now controls the idea of your identity.

I will give crayons to every angry third grader willing to color all over that idea until it is unrecognizable.

Real cryptography based identities with derived keys are possible. PGP allows this today. With some organization you could use PGP with twice derived keys for various identities that can be corralled under a single identity. Again, all possible today for the aspiring entrepreneur. What I think will be infinitely tricky is creating an organization that is international to manage them without influence. They can't be beholden to a single nation or continent. Being able to be influenced by any nation would need to be a P1 bug in the corporate architecture. You'd need a stupidly secure facility with offline data gaps, the kind that are proposed for things like SCADA.

Anyway, I've thought about this problem a good bit over the years. I'm interested in others thoughts.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#83

Post by d0lphin »

yarcob wrote: post #78
danpalmer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Apple restrict you to a single Apple ID? I use my personal Apple ID for personal things, my work one for work things, and as an admin of our Apple Business Manager account I can create new Apple IDs for anyone in the company as necessary. To my knowledge Apple doesn't even have a policy of requiring one account, I've certainly been told to set up separate accounts by Apple support teams. Facebook does have t…

Do you use multiple Apple IDs on one device? I tried doing that for some time, and it caused a lot of issues. Maybe it works if you have separate devices for work and for home use, but I use my Macs for both business and home use.

I do! I have a separate Apple ID for services like iMessage than I do for the App Store. I can't log into more Apple IDs than that in settings though.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#84

Post by [deleted] »

Terretta wrote: post #68
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My girlfriend bought an iPad for the kids to watch TV. It's shared by a couple of people. She had to log in with her Apple ID to set it up, and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid. Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user.

> Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user. Categorically not true. iPads in particular can be set up for multi-user with hand off. Shared iPad Overview: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mdm/cad7e2e0cf56/web Shared iPad for Education: https://developer.apple.com/education/shared-ipad/ Shared iPad for Business…

[deleted]

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#85

Post by lancesells »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #51
yarcob wrote: post #25

It's good that every service has separate credentials. For a counterexample, consider Apple and how they try to restrict you to a single Apple ID. They want everything to be tied to a single person. Every service you use is tied to your Apple ID. It just doesn't match the way that people use computers. For example, I get my computer games and business software billed to the same card, and there's no easy way to chang…

> My girlfriend bought an iPad for the kids to watch TV. It's shared by a couple of people. She had to log in with her Apple ID to set it up, and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid. Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user.

You can log out of iMessage and not set up email. It's silly that there aren't user accounts on the iPad at this point but you can get rid of most everything by logging out and setting up controls in Screentime.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#86

Post by kalium-xyz »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #66

Absolutely no. I present different facets of my personality in different circumstances, because not everyone needs to know, or wants to know, everything about me. Work, family, public profiles, private chat and entirely personal spaces are separate for a reason. I don't talk about tech in too much depth with most of my family, and neither do I share my home address with everyone who checks my LinkedIn page. Binding t…

They wont as of yet.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#87

Post by donmcronald »

saba2008 wrote: post #75
mbesto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need to log in with my personal credentials to download software from the Mac App store. Do you though? Why not just setup a "apps@ .com" and create a new account? > and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid. So just turn these services off? They aren't mandatory.

Registering AppleID involves phone number checking. In some countries getting one without exposing personal information is not trivial.

Lots of services won’t allow duplicates. For example, you can’t use the same number for account recovery on two different Microsoft accounts. Zoho won’t let you register more than one account with the same number. Etc..

I silo my profiles. I have 4 of them. It’s really hard to do. Everyone encourages you to put all your stuff into a single profile. It’s awful for work life balance and security, but it benefits big tech companies, so that’s why it’s like that.

Do you want separate profiles for your password manager? Pay twice. Do you want separate personal and work windows installs (dual boot)? Pay twice. Etc..

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#88

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

For those not reading the article: the purpose is to have better customer engagement, not to affect security or privacy in any way. They have a fractured ecosystem (customer-wise) and it makes people's lives annoying. (It's also a missed opportunity to simplify business intelligence)

The benefit to you, the consumer, is deeper connection to the AWS ecosystem. Your contributions can be tracked on a dashboard and added to a virtual resume, so you don't have to list every god damn service and account you've worked with in your resume. You can more easily contact support across accounts and services, forums, etc. If you've ever gone, "shit, in what account/region did I use that one S3 feature before?", you could look it up in your global user history.

It's the same thing as having one GitHub account that lists all your contributions across orgs/repos. You can always create another GitHub account linked to another key/email/identity.

Solving this is a good idea, and can be done without much technical work, but it won't be, because of their business model.

This is what Google already does: all your "stuff" is linked to a Google account across all their products/services, because their bread and butter is knowing who "you" are everywhere, so they can make money off "you".

AWS doesn't care who "you" are because (outside of Amazon Prime) they don't make money off "you", they make money when you pay them. Very different business model. There's effectively no business case to track "you" everywhere, so they're not going to put in the work.

But actually, this could be solved easily with PGP keys and a database of databases. Add your public key to every system that AWS has (or they can add it for you, based on your email address). They can look up your general information in any public key server. And if they need verification of who you are, just send them a signed E-mail or file or something. It would be tedious to do this manually for every service, so they can architect some internal service to map public keys to internal services to hopefully get the human validation part down to just one time.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#89

Post by Aaargh20318 »

ctvo wrote: post #59
Spivak wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it’s not really malicious to design a single-user system. At best it’s passively malicious. Sure, you can always share your personal pizza but you have to deal with the consequences that it was sized for one person and you both might be hungry after. Are you upset about the fact that you can’t have multiple isolated user-accounts on an iPhone?

> Are you upset about the fact that you can’t have multiple isolated user-accounts on an iPhone? The iPhone was mentioned once, to connect it’s not possible on either iPhone or iPad. This is about the iPad, a completely different class of device, where it makes sense it would be shared, at least within a family, and has nothing to do with personal pizzas. It'a small point here, but the way you moved the goal post so…

> This is about the iPad, a completely different class of device, where it makes sense it would be shared, at least within a family, and has nothing to do with personal pizzas.

It would be very awkward, even if you had multiple user accounts. How do you deal with things like notifications on the lock screen for messages, which can be very personal. There is so much personal stuff on my iPad, it would be like sharing a toothbrush. Sure, you could do it, but why would you ever want to ?

Computers have become deeply personal devices, to the point that having to keep personal stuff off them would negate a lot of their utility. Is there still a point to having shared computers ? Do people still do that ? Even my parents, who are in their late 60's and care little about technology both have their own personal laptops.

Re: AWS doesn’t know who I am

#90

Post by SilasX »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #66

Absolutely no. I present different facets of my personality in different circumstances, because not everyone needs to know, or wants to know, everything about me. Work, family, public profiles, private chat and entirely personal spaces are separate for a reason. I don't talk about tech in too much depth with most of my family, and neither do I share my home address with everyone who checks my LinkedIn page. Binding t…

Yes! This was exactly the premise of my April Fools joke this year, where I imagined that Google would stop doing authentication challenges, because they already know who you are and which identities you use from all that tracking:

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2021/04/leaked-google-init...

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