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posted by martyb on Saturday August 08 2015, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the 867-5309 dept.

I recently had a spirited discussion with someone about authenticating to various websites. I personally take the approach of making an explicit new identity for every service I sign up for — local logins only. I never user a "Social" login like twitter/facebook/google, etc to access a site.

My reasoning is:

  1. It's a little harder to track my movements across the web; less data for the big players to crunch has to be beneficial in some way.
  2. When a data breach occurs, it limits my exposure to the breached entity. With the thought that, if the place you use as your only Authenticator for all websites get's compromised, what kind of exposure does that entail?

For some background, I'm a ten year professional in Web Infrastructure, with Identity and Access Management making up a decent part of what I do. After pretty much being called an irresponsible professional and told that no identity information will leak due to the way OAUTH works, I thought I'd throw the question out to the community to get a feel for how you handle accounts to different websites, as well as the inherent tracking and security concerns thereof.

Bytram noted that we had a discussion on a similar topic a while back: Personal Privacy in a Surveillance World -- How Important is it? - SoylentNews


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:06PM (#219932)

    Same here but emergencies or events that require immediate attention occur.
    I can count on one hand how many times I have been in this kind of situation where the computer was logged-in but I was out of reach of the keyboard. When I return, I always get an uneasy feeling when I realize that it was left unattended.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 10 2015, @08:48PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2015, @08:48PM (#220893) Homepage Journal

    That happened to a Debian developer a few years ago. Someone used the unattended computer.

    It took a month before all the repositories had been checked and most of the Debian developers' keys had been reissued through their chain of trust.