Mozilla "Persona" beta release

Mozilla "Persona" beta release

Posted Sep 29, 2012 23:49 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Mozilla "Persona" beta release

I am concerned they are making the same mistake as OpenID, i.e not selling the service for what it is technically (a procedure for deferring the identification process to the user).

Indeed the FAQ say

Does Persona guarantee that I get a working email address for my users?

No, Persona only guarantees the user's association with an address. As with any email address in any login system, it's possible that the address no longer works or is not regularly checked by the user. For most users, the email address will be functional.

...which is technically true except for the last sentence which is purely wishful thinking, and was probably added to appease 'developers' (to use the FAQ terminology). Indeed standard auth-by-email requires the user at least to be able to receive email to the address, but not Persona.

They should be more upfront that Persona allow users to authenticate without providing any personal information, at least they would be more likely to attract the right kind of supporters. You do not foul people people very long anyway.

I hope they will provide software that make it trivially easy to use your personal website as your personal ID provider (something the OpenID developers completely failed to do, instead they favored third party ID providers which gained the ability to log all your connection to openID enabled website).

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