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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 09 2015, @12:14AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 09 2015, @12:14AM (#220056) Journal

    Relatively speaking - yes Google is a better than Facebook.

    You will probably realize that the two part authentication only works for Google services? That is, I'm not using Google to authenticate here on Soylent, or anywhere else on the web.

    Errrr - that's not quite accurate. I'm registered on two sites where the registration process just wouldn't complete. I finally gave up, and "registered" using my Google identity. Neither of those sites are "important", IMO. And, again, I wouldn't trust Facebook even with those unimportant logins.

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