The Keys To The Kingdom

This post crossed my radar recently and resonated with me a lot.

Reducing friction in your app (web or mobile) to get folks to sign up is a good thing but when the service tracking authorizations (tokens) goes away, what then? It’s not the end of the world but it’s why I’ve never used any of these quick sign in cheats and always create an account with my email and password. It takes an extra 30 seconds but not only do I not trust that Sign in with Apple will be around 30 years later, I also don’t like the large tech companies being the gatekeeper to hundreds of 3rd party services. Facebook obviously loves knowing everything you sign up for. These “sign in with” services are not in existence as a public service. They benefit the companies who maintain them.

Adam Chandler, What about “Log in with Twitter”?

During my first, and longest, time using Facebook, I made the mistake of entrusting that platform as a login to various other sites and services. That became a problem when I decided I wanted to quit Facebook. Thankfully, most of those connections were of limited value, so I either walked away or deleted those accounts. But in the case of Spotify, I had to contact their support team to get my account manually transferred back to a username and password.

Since then, I’ve always opted to set up a separate login for each new site or service. While that means a few extra steps, those can be handled using a password manager. And if a new place doesn’t give me that option, then that’s a hard pass from me.

From my experience, I can say with some confidence that these ‘social network sign-in’ systems are created and offered for the benefit of the platform, not the user, nor the site or service it’s embedded into.