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Mozilla Launches Persona Identity Bridge For Gmail

Posted by samzenpus on from the being-yourself dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today announced the Persona Identity Bridge for Gmail users. If you have a Google account, this means you can now sign into Persona-powered websites with your existing credentials. The best part is of course Mozilla's pledge to its users. 'Persona remains committed to privacy: Gmail users can sign into sites with Persona, but Google can't track which sites they sign into,' Mozilla Pesrona engineer Dan Callahan promises."

4 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And this is impressive why? by Noughmad · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is impressive. It's basically separation of powers. Google has your account, but doesn't know what sites you visit. Mozilla doesn't have your account, but knows what websites you visit*. The websites themselves have nothing, except a confirmation that the e-mail address is really yours.

    I, for one, trust Mozilla more than Google, and both much more than the average website.

    *: I think I read some time ago in the documentation that Mozilla can't see what websites are requesting the auth. I'm not sure I remember it right, and I never checked the claim, and it might have changed since that time. For now, I assume the information is visible.

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  2. Re:And this is impressive why? by icknay · · Score: 5, Informative
    Are you kidding? Persona solves a whole raft of super common problems
    • -Say for example kittens.com site you post on is hacked. With Persona the bad guys don't get anything. There is no password stored on kittens.com. It's more akin to certs. That alone will eliminate a whole class of internet disasters that we read about every week on slashdot.
    • -I don't want to make up yet another stupid username/password recovery question for every site. Now I can just use one of the Persona identities I already have, and I'm done. I also trust Mozilla or Google a lot more to be on top of security than kittens.com
    • -Unlike, say, facebook connect, this is a federated standard, not dependent on any org. You can run your own identity-provider if you like, not that most people would care to.
  3. Re:What about the NSA? by icebike · · Score: 5, Informative

    NSA letter. Where the hell have you been?

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595202-38/feds-put-heat-on-web-firms-for-master-encryption-keys/
    http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/24/1812227/anonymous-source-claims-feds-demand-private-ssl-keys-from-web-services
    http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/355146

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  4. Re:And this is impressive why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Persona is a reference implementation of the BrowserID protocol, which is fully decentralized.

    If your browser and email provider (or your own domain!) support BrowserID / Persona, then Mozilla is completely removed from the login transaction. We don't want to be able to track you, and we've designed a system that automatically removes us from the picture as it gains traction.