Mozilla Launches Persona Identity Bridge For Gmail 114
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."
What about the NSA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And this is impressive why? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is news because the browser becomes increasingly biased. First Facebook integration, now a Google identity bridge (or whatever it is called). Firefox increasingly gravitates towards the money and away from the neutral zone. It's about time to switch to Seamonkey or Chromium.
Re:What about the NSA? (Score:5, Interesting)
They post exactly what they have on you and how they use the data here. [thenextweb.com]
Basically it keeps Google from snooping, and allows Mozilla still has some records of the sites you access.
All information is transferred by SSL but its highly likely that Mozilla has already been forced to quietly turn over its SSL keys
to the government. (At least Snowden claims this has happened).
So at best you protect yourself from Google, and make the government look in two databases to see where you log in.
Seems like a really bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
If I use this then presumably every website that I sign in to would have my real private Gmail address. As it is now, I use a free forwarding service (Spamgourmet) to create a unique address for everyone I sign up with. That way, if and when the spam starts, I can disable just that one address rather than having to go through the tassel of abandoning my prime email address. And I have been spammed at some of those addresses that I created, both by the people that I signed up with and sometimes even by Chinese malware sent to addresses that only one company had and that should have been keeping their data very secure. So, no thank you, I'll go through the extra hassle of keeping separate names and passwords for all of the sites that I want to sign in to, and be a little less concerned that I opened myself to endless spamming and attacks.
And before anyone questions it, yes, I have had to abandon some email addresses before I started using a forwarding service. In one case that I particularly remember I logged in one day and there was so much duplicate spam in my inbox that it used the mailbox's full quota and was effectively a denial of service attack. The attack lasted longer than the account did.
The Problem With Mozilla's Persona (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, the deal-breaker with Persona is that it is tied to my email address and exposes that unique identifier to every website that does Persona.. The pro-persona types argue that is a benefit, that people are used to using their email address as a relatively constant identifier.
My argument is that giving the same email address out to every website makes it super-easy for those websites to cross-reference my web usage. Nowadays your email address is the online equivalent of your social-security number for marketers. It is the most useful key in the cyberstalker/marketing databases. All of the cyberstalker companies like BlueKai, Janrain, Scorecard, Doubeclick, etc create phantom profiles of people on the web that just sit dormant until you give one of their partner websites your email address and then they file all that dormant data in with any other data associated with your address.
Some people say, no problem, just create a different email address for every website you visit. Yeah, right. That's no problem at all. The system isn't designed for that. If there were a way to generate a login credential unique to each website so cross-referencing didn't work and it was easy and automatic, then Persona would be useful. As it is now it is only mis-leading, addressing a privacy problem we had 5 years ago but it does nothing to protect us against the current state of the art in privacy invasion.
Re: And this is impressive why? (Score:0, Interesting)
You trust Mozilla even though they want to build aggregating and selling [mozilla.org] your browsing history and "interests" (derived from the contents of the pages you visit) into the Firefox browser?
Re:What about the NSA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Persona has been designed to be fully decentralized. Mozilla plans to be removed from the equation. So that should really help to up the anonymizability (suck it spell check!) of the system.
Re:And this is impressive why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhhhh...you just NOW figured this out?
Sigh, more anti-FOSS fud from somebody who should know better. Plenty of people have explained this to you in past conversations.
In fact, Google is not the default search engine in all the localized versions of Firefox. There's long been a Yandex version of Firefox and Yandex is the default in Russia and Russian speaking countries.
More recently, Mozilla partnered with Microsoft, once its arch nemesis, to offer a Bing-themed version of Firefox. Bing, of course, is a default search option in Firefox.
Now, Microsoft and Mozilla are partnering once again with a MSN-themed version of the browser, for the people that still use MSN for some reason. Probably the same reason why people still use Yahoo Mail.
This version of the browser comes with the standard modifications, Bing as the default search engine, both in the search box and the AwesomeBar, a link to msnNOW in the toolbar and MSN as the homepage.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/MSN-ified-Version-of-Firefox-Dilutes-Mozilla-s-Dependence-on-Google-310533.shtml [softpedia.com]