Users don't like social login

http://identity.mozilla.com/post/45842909320/users-dont-like-social-login

by AndrewDucker • 13 years ago

553 229 13 years ago

identity.mozilla.com

hp50g• 13 years ago

To be honest I don't get to see social logins. Adblock and ghostery seem to put and end to them and my participation.

And that's the way I like it :)

guan• 13 years ago

I don’t like social login, but I do like not having to create yet another account.

LandoCalrissian• 13 years ago

I would much rather make a new account with my e-mail than have anything linked to my Google/Facebook account. I'm really uncomfortable exposing other sites to that information.

price• 13 years ago

Indeed. The article doesn't make the context clear up front (perhaps because it's on a blog and partly aimed at people who already know what the blog is about), but the author and Mozilla have a solution to that problem that isn't "social". The post mentions it toward the end:

"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.

jdechko3• 13 years ago

I don't like social login because I'm not on any social networks. It could be a great service, but as soon as I see that it's Facebook/Twitter/G+ only, I'm out.

ersii4• 13 years ago

That's what I like with Persona, since I've made my personal domain a Identity Provider. I just log on and click okay to authenticate.

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).

jpdevereaux• 13 years ago

While I'd like to agree, I'd also like to see something beyond anecdotal evidence on this. It'd give me a great excuse next time someone wants a Facebook login and a Twitter login and a Pinterest login [sic] on the same site.

arindone2• 13 years ago

100% agreed -- anecdotal blog posts should not be up-voted to oblivion simply because the community at HN agrees with them. (Though I find it ironic that such a technical community doesn't consider lack of data in arguments like these an issue.)

jdlshore5• 13 years ago

In case you're not familiar with them, this blog comes from the Mozilla Identity team, which is creating a unified login product called "Persona." It's basically the features of social login (you don't have to create a new account for every site) without the drawbacks (an advertising-driven company knowing your every login).

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

judofyr• 13 years ago

Re: your second point:

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.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

I wonder how confusing for the user it is to subscribe to site A and receive a confirmation email from Person instead of that site.

fmarier• 13 years ago

Regarding the case-sensitivity issues, this pull request should have fixed all of the outstanding ones: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/pull/3078

Of course, if you find anything we've missed, please file a bug :)

callahad18• 13 years ago

> 2- Signup flow could be better.

Upgrade to the Observer API (`.watch` and `.request`) and your users will automatically get a super smooth post-verification experience, just like you described.

basicallydan3• 13 years ago

Thank you for providing a link to try it out :)

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).

callahad18• 13 years ago

> at the end of the day I'm still relying on a single company to hold the keys to many accounts

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.

ancarda• 13 years ago

I'm interested to know how Persona works server-side? AFAIK, it's entirely done in JavaScript. I can't imagine sending the browser ID over Ajax to make a session, it seems far too easy to exploit.

Perhaps I'm missing something.

callahad18• 13 years ago

Check out around 16:00 to 20:30 in my talk: http://pyvideo.org/video/1764

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.

tracker15• 13 years ago

One note... I really don't like that there's no mention of subscription pricing before giving you information.

jdlshore5• 13 years ago

It was in the first paragraph of the "subscribe" page. But I've modified the page to make it more obvious. Thanks for the feedback.

adrianhoward3• 13 years ago

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.

jdlshore5• 13 years ago

Not in this case. The signup flow for my site is "decide to subscribe, put in email address, put in credit card, create Persona account."

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.

martinced4• 13 years ago

"not having to implement my own password-management infrastructure, ..., as well as insulating me from the hard security problems that come along with such a beast."

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.

jdlshore5• 13 years ago

Authentication requires attention to security no matter how do it. There's no silver bullet.

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...

callahad18• 13 years ago

> What happens when the single sign-on server gets compromised?

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.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 13 years ago

>So it can be used not securely? Like OAuth?

So long as you specify your origins properly and properly check the response from their verification service, it's perfectly secure.

uribs• 13 years ago

Yes, actually we don't want ANY login/registration.

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.

yebyen5• 13 years ago

I learned today that StackOverflow (and company) have responsive support persons who respond via e-mail, that will help you recover and merge your cookie-based StackExchange accounts if you've lost access and there is sufficient evidence that they belong to you. (I thought I had registered the account under the myid.net provider (who is now defunct?) but no.)

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"?

http://kingdon.myid.net

rogerbinns• 13 years ago

What is infuriating about the stackoverflow sites is that they treat each site separately so you end up with multiple logins across the "network" that you really don't care about. Then they do that annoying thing where they display the page, then detect you are "logged in", and then tell you to refresh.

yeonhoyoon• 13 years ago

it reads: thanks for using myid.net so far, we have decided to discontinue the service.

date of close : 2013-02-27

jdechko3• 13 years ago

Yes! I hate it when I have to register for a service, wait for the email activation link only to find out that I that the service isn't for me. Then I have to delete the account and wait for emails to come to unsubscribe to those.

k3n6• 13 years ago

Even worse is that many times you can't delete your account, or if you can, it's just a soft-delete -- and now that site has your email address (at a minimum), and sometimes may have much more information about you.

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.

vacri• 13 years ago

How onerous our lives have become!

mrweasel4• 13 years ago

That is absolutely true, or at least I think it is. The single best thing we did it to allow our customer to do a purchase without being logged in.

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.

ersii4• 13 years ago

Just wanted to say Thank You. I wish more people/stores would do this.

tracker15• 13 years ago

We did the same thing with one of the sites at work... You can make a purchase without login, and the related emails to a given order includes a token so you can see that order's status without login.. If there isn't an account at that email, we generate one with a few space-separated random words, and email the user... password recovery is email only and pretty easy. All in all, the user experience has been pretty well received.

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...

eric_the_read• 13 years ago

My favourite online tea store does this too, and it's one reason I ended up eventually creating an account with them. anybody who dies this automatically gets a credibility boost in my eyes.

twic2• 13 years ago

Good work, sir. People know about the Three Hundred Million Dollar button < http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/ >, right? Right?

vy8vWJlco• 13 years ago

One could use something like a copy-and-pastable session/state string/encoding (that a user should keep secret, if secrecy is important to them) at the bottom of every important page that a person might want to return to (rather than in the URL or the invisible, and therefore unmanageable, cookie). If they care enough to save it, they have an account (ex, they don't have to fill in their shipping info for the 9th time...). If they don't care enough to save it, it can be automatically deleted after a period of inactivity. (This was a common solution to "saving state" in older video games without persistent memory. It wasn't "too complicated" either. People used it, if they wanted to get back to that difficult boss level.)

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...)

nicksergeant• 13 years ago

Technical people don't like social login.

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.

patja• 13 years ago

Tangentially related, for similar reasons Paypal remains my payment processor. Lots of people have Paypal accounts and find it much more convenient to use it rather than haul out their credit card and hand key all of their address and payment info. Every time I think about switching I review how many people use PayPal Express checkout rather than credit card DirectPay (both of which I offer), and I think about how many people simply wouldn't pay if the minimal friction of the PayPal Express button wasn't there on my checkout form.

Lowest friction wins.

wingspan2• 13 years ago

Totally agree! Because I am not the biggest fan of PayPal, one of the best things I did to speed up ecommerce for myself was to memorize my CC details.

TheCoelacanth2• 13 years ago

I'm a technical person and I don't like social login and I don't like creating individual account for every site. What I would like is a decentralized single-login protocol like the article is talking about.

badida2• 13 years ago

Check the Techcrunch article I cited: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/30/email-social-signup-rockmel... - major social sites have seen data indicating that 50% of potential users don't sign up if it's social only. This is a real-people issue.

mun2mun• 13 years ago

One example of this is pud's launching of fandalism.com. When he announced the site on HN[1] some HNers complained about Facebook only login. But he was still able to get 400,000+ signups within 3 month[2].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850739

switch332• 13 years ago

A facebook "only" login is the key here. Given a choice many people rather create a new login or not use facebook.

ersii4• 13 years ago

It's neat that they apparently got 400k sign-ups, even though they only had the Facebook Login option.

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.

ed209• 13 years ago

MailChimp concluded that social login wasn't worth it. Would be interesting to know how much of their demographic consists of "technical people"

https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-...

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

Highly likely because MailChimp is a BUSINESS site, not some consumer site. Normal people love to just click a button and see their facebook image and name saying, "Welcome back, John Doe!" - without any pesky emails or other junk.

chaz• 13 years ago

Aren't most of the people logging into Mailchimp online marketers? Maybe "technical" is the wrong word, but their customers are all in the tech business somehow or another. I think that qualifies.

dangoldin3• 13 years ago

We're seeing the same thing. Almost everyone decides to sign up with Facebook with email being a single click away.

enjo• 13 years ago

Wow, my experience and testing was quite different (not a huge site, a few hundred thousand users). When given the choice between creating a new login/password or using Facebook it broke about 70% to a new login/password. Demphasizing facebook login increased conversion rate pretty substantially.

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:)

ersii4• 13 years ago

Please don't generalize too much. There's different demographics and individuals who like things in different configurations.

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)

arindone2• 13 years ago

Agreed -- this article shows not one data point to back-up their argument, but if you do look users actually opt for social login due to ease of access and use. Hell it's what makes paypal so easy and popular -- you put your data in one trusted service, and it works with minimal pain points across any site that requires payments.

notJim• 13 years ago

Technical person here, and I will use Facebook or Twitter login 10 times out of 10. I do not want to create a new account for your service unless you absolutely force me to.

ozten• 13 years ago

Mozilla's user research group has done some qualitative research, and many subjects didn't like being forced to use a social login like Facebook.

Here is a presentation on one of their recent studies https://air.mozilla.org/online-identity/

goronbjorn• 13 years ago

Mailchimp had similar findings, albeit coming from a different angle: http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-i...

yesimahuman2• 13 years ago

I think adding social auth was one of the biggest mistakes we made for the beta of Jetstrap. Users constantly forget which service they use. We added email/pass authentication, but now older users think they had a password when they didn't, and with django social auth you can't reset the password for a social account.

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.

snaky• 13 years ago

Why don't put the way the user was logged in by last time in cookie and just highlight it next time for him? Or even more explicit - add the "you have logged in this way last time" under the appropriate button?

Technically that's easy to implement.

tempestn3• 13 years ago

If a user returns relatively quickly they generally remember how they logged in. The problem is when they come back after some months. At that point, they've probably completely forgotten how they logged in, and have cleared their cookies for some reason or another. It's a standard troubleshooting suggested by many websites. (Not saying it should be so, but it is.)

yesimahuman2• 13 years ago

That's an okay solution in the short term. Long-term though it doesn't seem to solve the problem.

biznickman2• 13 years ago

Users always complain about social logins. On iOS apps that I've built, I've found Facebook login to have something like a 50% conversion. I'd be curious to hear whether or not the conversion is improved by using Mozilla's Persona product. Is the only sales pitch here that the login is managed by a non-profit organization?

Not sure how that makes this a better product overall. Can anybody clarify?

callahad18• 13 years ago

Major difference: Social auth outsources your user table. Persona outsources your password column. You still have your own users, and you still have a portable identifier for them.

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).

biznickman2• 13 years ago

That answers that!

dasil003• 13 years ago

I don't understand your first point. How can you have an app function without a users table?

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.

callahad18• 13 years ago

Hi, I'm on the Persona team at Mozilla. If you'd like to learn more about what and why Mozilla is doing with authentication, I gave a 45-minute talk at PyCon US this past Saturday. You can find the video here: http://pyvideo.org/video/1764

I'm also happy to answer questions in-thread or via email.

jamesaguilar2• 13 years ago

My main question is: where is the support for the assertion made in the article title? As far as I can tell, it's just made, and then the remainder of the article treats it as a premise or a claim to be supported only with vague anecdotes.

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.

callahad18• 13 years ago

Hopefully someone else will chime in with actual citations, but we've seen a preponderance of evidence from our own user studies, from MailChimp, TechCrunch, and Voo.st's published comments, from Gawker Media's creation of an in-house non-social mechanism shortly after they tried to go social-only, and from private conversations with companies who have daily active user counts well into the millions.

> 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.)

mrweasel4• 13 years ago

I looked at Persona for a project a friend of mine is doing, and I pretty much rejected from the start. Persona seems flawed in that it assumes email as identity.

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?

pyvek• 13 years ago

Persona's about page says that you can use multiple email addresses with a single account.

"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

Noxchi• 13 years ago

Email address is the backbone of web identity. Nearly every registration system uses it. If you're having trouble with it, maybe, just maybe, it's on your end?

masivemunkey• 13 years ago

I think you may have a unique case on your hands. I am a web developer for a big eCommerce site and we use emails to identify users (we switched from usernames to emails after a few months of testing actually). After three years of the site being up we have only had a handful of people get confused about their email changing.

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.

sudhirj• 13 years ago

That actually sounds pretty hard to believe - Amazon uses your email id as your username for one, as does iCloud. Both services have hundreds of millions of users.

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

How, today, can I integrate Persona login into my site without referencing any third-party Javascript? Does any solution exist for sites that by policy only load Javascript from the same origin?

badida2• 13 years ago

not yet, but we're working on it: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/3119

hackernewbie• 13 years ago

Thank you so much for this system. I sincerely hope that this gets more traction than OpenID. This is the most essential feature the entire web has never had.

mcovey• 13 years ago

I am very happy with the way persona works, both as an end user, and how easy it is to integrate into applications. I am hoping it gets some good marketing done or whatever is needed to make more sites start using it.

tlear• 13 years ago

Is there a plan for iOS sdk, or perhaps you know of someone working on one that is active?

callahad18• 13 years ago

Rough draft at a first iOS SDK is available as of this week: https://github.com/mozilla/persona-ios

bozho2• 13 years ago

And here's my How-To for adding Persona authentication to your site: http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=1056

callahad18• 13 years ago

Thanks for that post! Do you have any suggestions for how the official documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/Quick_Setup) could be improved?

bozho2• 13 years ago

Hi. I have to confess I neglected my promise to contribute to the official documentation, but I haven't found the time..

fakeer2• 13 years ago

I actually do not login to website that asks me login either using Google a/c, Facebook or so. Twitter being an exception because everything at Twitter I've anyway made public, but I hesitate still.

paranoiacblack2• 13 years ago

That's a strange opinion to have though, because before doing login through either of these services, you will be asked if you want to give that app permission to certain parts of your account. For example, I might have you log in through Google to verify your email and I don't see a reason why you wouldn't let me see it; you've already shared your email with my app to register an account in the first place.

fakeer2• 13 years ago

I should have been clearer.

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).

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

There's an "evil" incentive to have social logins such as Twitter + FB. It gives you a free access token, which can be extremely useful, especially if you're building a social media analytics service, or some sort of tool that requires making API calls.

janus• 13 years ago

The worst offenders are sites that lead you into logging in with a social account and then ask you to add your email and create a password anyway.

davidroberts• 13 years ago

The worst offenders are those that lead you into a social login, then post every page you view on your facebook wall. I've learned some fascinating things about my friends' reading tastes this way, but I'm sure they weren't happy about it.

anoncow• 13 years ago

Some use social login as an alternative to valid email id testing(atleast i do). Saves money when your outbound email is quota restricted (appengine).

paranoiacblack2• 13 years ago

Yes, I do this exact same thing. I really don't want to store password on my side and I'm of the impression that sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter do this better than I ever will and that most of the users visiting the site will have some kind of account on these sites. Ignoring man-in-the-middle attacks, if one of the above thinks the email is valid, I have no reason not to.

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.

jbigelow76• 13 years ago

I whole heartedly agree with this. Any site that tries that I immediately stop creating the account.

IheartApplesDix2• 13 years ago

As hard as remembering different passwords for different sites is for the end user, I really think it's about time the user took a step toward meeting security and engineers in the middle.

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..

martinced4• 13 years ago

Exactly. But sadly you're in a tiny minority of people thinking about the security implications. Most developers don't: which is why we're having countless OAuth exploits and whatnots.

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.

mikec3k• 13 years ago

I prefer logging in with Facebook or Twitter rather than having to remember yet another login. You can always revoke access later.

breck• 13 years ago

We just implemented Persona across all our sites and are very happy with 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.

IheartApplesDix2• 13 years ago

I doubt users really care about what type of login they use. Instead, users are starting to associate social logins with spammy bullshit, federated identity marketed shitfest of Web 3.0, built on the SAML/HTML5-based Intelectual Property and right forfeiture platform.

switch332• 13 years ago

Surprisingly companies are finally realizing this. Like companies really thought people would not care to give away all their 'social' unneeded information for some random x or y service.

anonfunction• 13 years ago

The point about having multiple providers and forgetting which one you used rang true to me. My gotos are twitter, google, or github and it seems I change based on the type of app I'm connecting with.

harryh• 13 years ago

Claiming what users like or do not like without metrics is deeply suspicious.

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

In case anyone was wondering (like I was), Mozilla Persona is built on BrowserID introduced last year.

neilkumar• 13 years ago

With regards to the last point - privacy from your identity provider -- isn't that somewhat moot for most sites as they have those facebook/twitter/google+/etc share/like/plus icons that report back anyways.

shmerl• 13 years ago

I wish more sites would start using Persona, instead of privacy disrespecting FB or G+ login helpers. Even OpenID isn't as widely used as it could be.

FuzzyDunlop• 13 years ago

> We also noticed that users dislike the NASCAR-style > plastering of branded login buttons.

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.

callahad18• 13 years ago

Thanks! You can help it take off: try Persona out and let me know about your experience. Persona can't be the right solution without outside voices to help shape it.

Of course, if you think Mozilla is on the right track, ask a site you use to support Persona. :)

larsberg• 13 years ago

I rely on LastPass for confusing sites like that one. If it weren't for that addon, I'd never know, for example, which of the 7 or so Windows Live accounts that have been generated on my behalf is The Right One for which website.

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

I merely bought and installed an xbox 360, and now I have a small number of windows live or hotmail or xbox accounts, I haven no idea which are distinct accounts and which are linked in some way. Ptthht, ptthht. Trying to cancel the auto re-up of their gold account was a nightmare of circular hate. Ptthht.

archagon• 13 years ago

I usually hate social logins, but I actually like the way SO does it because you can bind your account to multiple services. Now I no longer have to remember which specific one I picked.

tracker15• 13 years ago

Ditto.. I also really appreciate it when you are writing a comment for a blog you crossed in a search. Never been to X site before, likely won't be back.. but like to comment when an article's content is dated, or no longer relevant. Sometimes that gets harder than others.

dochtman• 13 years ago

If you want to run your own Persona Identity Provider (so you can login directly with your own email account and control the authentication from your own domain/site/server instead of having to remember yet another password for the fallback Identity Provider provided by persona.org), here's a tiny little piece of Python code that implements that:

https://bitbucket.org/djc/persona-totp

In particular, the authentication method I use is Google Authenticator-compatible TOTP (RFC 6238).

StavrosK8• 13 years ago

That's fantastic, thank you! You just showed me simple examples of at least two technologies I considered complicated to implement.

daredevildave• 13 years ago

This is exactly what I said to Ben when we implemented Persona at PlayCanvas.

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.

jvandenbroeck• 13 years ago

Bold claims without any evidence backing it up.

malbiniak• 13 years ago

I'm glad to see I'm not alone.

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.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

I agree very much with this. What I do is use "dummy" facebook, google, email etc accounts to log into sites that either require social logins or make it easy to try with social logins, but that I don't trust yet.

I am generally suspicious of sites that require or "encourage" logins with social details.

lukeh• 13 years ago

We (PADL) have developed a SASL/GSS mechanism for Persona, which you can get here:

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!

StavrosK8• 13 years ago

Hey, that looks very interesting! I hope it goes places.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

It would be nice to see actual user studies rather than quoting TechCrunch. Tech journalists are not everyone's target market.

recurser• 13 years ago

Just a random data point, but one of my apps with a definite non-technical demographic gets 97% of logins via facebook, 2.5% via twitter, and 0.5% via email/password registration. I haven't tested it obviously, but I don't think removing Facebook login would do much for conversions.

jsp78• 13 years ago

Is there an option to not provide my email as part of the "identity" because I could see that being a barrier to signing up for some sites?

callahad18• 13 years ago

You must provide an email address, but you're free to use disposable or other addresses.

lubujackson• 13 years ago

I love the concept of Persona and hopes it catches on. One question I can't seem to find the answer to, though.

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?

saurik10• 13 years ago

Alternatively, what happens when someone graduates, changes ISPs, a domain name expires, or they get a new job, and someone later takes control of their email address? As concrete example, if you attend UCSB, you can easily get them to give you saurik@ right now on various of their servers I used to use for vaguely-official UCSB uses.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4233391

sergiosgc9• 13 years ago

What is the alternative, then? That's the million dollar question. Even phone numbers, which have a large personal switching cost are ephemeral for many people. SSNs or other government mandated IDs are not acceptable. I see no better alternative.

kijin• 13 years ago

IMO, the whole point of tying multiple email addresses to one Persona account is to prevent websites from figuring out that both addresses are tied to the same person.

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.

sergiosgc9• 13 years ago

Persona identity providers should be the email providers. If the email provider goes bust, then that identity is lost. If they only stop supporting Persona, then Mozilla steps in and supports Persona on that domain. I think it's quite an interesting approach.

vxNsr• 13 years ago

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/

adrianhoward3• 13 years ago

"Users don’t like social login" should actually read "Some people don't like social login in some contexts - other people like it, or even prefer it, in others".

At least that's what I've seen in user testing... but that's not as interesting I guess.

Aissen• 13 years ago

Meanwhile, the Persona vs Personas mess is not fixed yet:

http://www.getpersonas.com/

https://persona.org

Context: Personas should have been renamed to "Themes". But apparently it's not done yet.

meerita• 13 years ago

I'm 1Password user. I dont' have to trouble anymore with logins nor selling my ID to Facebook, Twitter or Google. I only use social on those apps where the owners think you only need Twitter/Facebook as the option to use their apps.

StavrosK8• 13 years ago

To see an example of Persona, you can visit http://www.yourpane.com and click the "Persona" button (don't enter an email address).

k_bx• 13 years ago

Biggest problem with social login for me is that I have all of them (google, twitter, facebook etc.), and sometimes multiple (google, twitter).

hawkw• 13 years ago

This just in: users don't like social login, water is wet, sky blue..

muratmutlu• 13 years ago

"Lesson 2: Social Sign-in is Better Than Email Sign-in After dozens of failed A/B tests to improve the conversion rates of our landing page, we came up with the idea to enable social sign-in (i.e., signing up for a Buffer account and logging in using your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account).

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."

http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/ux-design-mistakes/

martinced4• 13 years ago

The biggest problem with "social login" ain't about advertizing companies like FB and Google having all your infos.

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".

callahad18• 13 years ago

> 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.

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.

drdaeman2• 13 years ago

I really hate when my identity is provided to me by some third party. It universally applies to both social networks and Persona. I don't like the very idea of leasing my own identity.

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.

TheCoelacanth2• 13 years ago

> 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.

drdaeman2• 13 years ago

I believe domain names are still inappropriate for identities. Even XRI i-numbers was a better idea.

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.

Users don't like social login

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