AOL Now Supports OpenID

Posted by Zonk on Sunday February 18, 2007 @10:33AM from the making-progress dept.

Nurgled writes "On Sunday John Panzer announced that AOL now has experimental OpenID server support. This means that every AOL user now has an OpenID identifier. OpenID is a decentralized cross-site authentication system which has been growing in popularity over the last few months. AOL is the first large provider to offer OpenID services, and though they do not currently accept logins to their services with OpenID identifiers from elsewhere, they are apparently working on it. The next big challenge for OpenID proponents is teaching AOL's userbase how to make use of this new technology."

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Re: Why would we want OpenID? by Dolda2000 · 2007-02-18 13:15 · Score: 4, Interesting

The tracking doesn't primarily depend on the authentication server's ability to log whenever you authenticate, but rather that having single sign-on drastically increases your tendency to reuse the same identity on every website you log into. In other words, cross-site tracking be done much more reliably than before.
Of course, many here on Slashdot could probably set up their own OpenID server that has a unique identifier for each site, but how many do you think {are going to/are able to} do that -- especially among AOL users?