It's not a stretch of an imagination that Apple might cut a developer out of the app store for some abstract-defined violation of terms (as they do now) and now ALSO cut that developer from the identity/contact with their users. In total, this is almost the ultimate kill switch to push companies to adhere to their policies or risk a total shutout. This scenario might be considered overblown, if it wasn't that Apple already exercises pushy monopoly(esk) control on their ecosystem. The new identity system expands that control to now outside the Apple hardware ecosystem, possibly affecting platforms like Android.
I'm ranting here a little, but I think we should be cautious of accepting privacy as the sole reason Apple wants to enforce all app authentication to use.
No they're not. They're preventing third parties from accessing your data. You can communicate with your customers just fine; it's just that if you sell their data (or get hacked) the email you get is useless.
The parent commenter is correctly pointing out that Apple would be able to disable the email for other reasons as well.
It's not like you can ask Apple to forward emails to your own email server if you decide that you no longer want to use Apple.
I think Apple shutting down your access is a legitimate concern. Yet Apple is the only one who has taken any steps to protect the customer here. The reality is we are unlikely to see other major competitors to Apple find a better alternative because their entire business is built on exploiting user data.
And 3rd parties who create a similar system are unlikely to be successful because they don’t have the clout to convince websites to incorporate them.
- Is there a big enough reason to motivate them to do so?
- If given a "legitimate" justification, would they?
If either of those are "yes" then the question we need to know is: "Is there any appeal, oversight, etc?"
With these emails they could trivially, and surgically, cut off a developer from every customer. It is a one-to-many action that also has no obvious other side effects (unlike bricking users phones).
Not sure where I stand with this, but wanting to point out that the added powers this gives Apple are very real and different from the ones they had before (again, maybe this is a good thing, but it’s undeniable that it is a different thing).
It’s just that whenever Apple decides so, the email you got becomes useless.
Apple is judge, jury and executioner, and it makes the laws. That is problematic.
Here’s a crazy idea: if you don’t want your users giving you a private forwarding address, give them some reason to trust you with their real one, instead of saying they’re idiots who don’t know what’s best for themselves.
But if you come to trust the app, and Apple excommunicates it, should you need to rely on Apple to help you reestablish your own contact with it? That won't work -- Apple already demonstrated that they don't like that app.
That's why makomk's complaint is
> there is no way for users to prove their accounts belong to them without Apple's co-operation
rather than "I should be able to get customer emails from Apple regardless of what the customers want".
If Apple for some reason doesn’t allow the app maker to use the OATH service, I doubt very seriously that they will cancel the email forwarding without the user specifically turning off the forwarding.
At that point both the user and the app provider both have generated email address.
Where's this confidence coming from? If Apple sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Apple specific userbase for any reason / violation, other people seem correct in their theorization that there's nothing you can really do as the developer.
Not implementing this new "Sign in with Apple" will also probably be interpreted as not being privacy friendly by the users, a developer can't really have that either.
Pretty much the definition of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If Facebook sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your FB specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do.
If Google sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Google specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do.
Worse
If Gmail sees it fit to prevent you (the developer) from accessing your Gmail specific user base for any reason / violation there is nothing you can really do. Gmail already does this occasionally by quickly blacklisting non Gmail senders in their spam filters.
If Apple tells you to take a hike, and then subsequently disables the email redirect -- you're completely SOL. You'd have no way to reach out to the user anymore, unless you took other identifying bits of info. And if you did that anyway, that defeats the purpose of AppleID to begin with.
Most users will probably not even be tracking what autogenerated email they're using, hence you no longer have a way to reliably reconcile what user had which account.
Regarding the GMail specific case though, I fully agree. Being banned by GMail is a company ending thing.
Probably from the fact that disabling these email addresses would be a distinctly user-hostile move. If Apple determines that the developer is actually a malicious entity who slipped malware past the App Review process, then it might be reasonable for them to disable the forwarded emails as well as a malware vendor has no legitimate reason to talk to "users", but beyond that specific scenario, cutting off the email address harms the users who signed up for that service. For example, if the app actually represents a web service, and Apple determines that the app shouldn't be in the App Store for whatever reason, blocking "Sign In With Apple" (which is distinct from removing the app from the app store) and cutting off the email address means the user has no way to recover their account even though the service is still active, just without an app. There is no reason for Apple to take this step as it benefits nobody and only serves to harm Apple user.
I'll even go one step further and say that I personally don't think Apple will do it unless under extreme circumstances.
The thing is though, business continuity assessment still points to adopting Apple login to be a bad idea. You never really know when you'll find yourself in hot water with one of your vendors, especially a vendor who's a LOT more powerful than you.
I agree with the group that's (rightfully, imo) concerned about handing over this amount of power over their business to any 3rd party. There's a real potential for abuse.
The percent of times I want to recieve email communication from something I have to sign up for is very close to 0.
For example, do we need the ability for Apple to delete the link between a company and all their users in one sweep, or is it sufficient to make it easy for individual users to cut such ties?
If the latter, could we remove that giant master switch, or move control of it to a third party?
(I haven’t watched the video, so, possibly, that giant switch doesn’t exist. Skimming https://developer.apple.com/sign-in-with-apple/get-started/ didn’t tell me that, either)
There is, it's called IM2000 where email becomes a pull-based system instead of push-based (so users would have to consent to spam, and spammers have to store their spam to send it in bulk). Unfortunately, despite many attempts to switch over we're still stuck on the current incarnation of SMTP.
There also isn’t an easy transition from now — I can see exactly why we’re “stuck” with what’s actually a pretty great last bastion of decentralization on the Internet, for all its warts.
But yes, the transition would require replacing SMTP so once again we're stuck on a system that is terrible enough to grumble about but not terrible enough to change.
(I would also argue that Matrix is becoming a new decentralised system for the internet, as well as ActivityPub depending on who you ask.)
1. when your business is on the app store it can be difficult not doing whatever Apple wants you to do because not doing what they want you to do can come close to destroying your business. This has often been compared to being a hostage of Apple.
2. If you suddenly decide to stop paying the Apple tax or if Apple decides to ban you - cutting you off from new business - it can certainly be problematic and can kill many businesses but you could theoretically keep going because you could have a customer base you inform of your decision and tell them to download your app from your homepage instead of the app store etc. In short - in the event of Apple not liking you anymore you can communicate with your customers.
3. In this new setup if Apple does not like you anymore you cannot tell your customers hey Apple doesn't like me anymore.
Thus Apple increases its ability to hold your company hostage and thus I do not believe it is the same logic as Google controls Gmail unless when selling an Android app Google only allows you to do so if your customer has a Gmail account.
Centralization of communications is not a good thing and it's worth discussing whether we're going in the right direction.
Google does not have a mapping between an application and email address the customer used in that application. Also Google is not really enticing a customer not to provide the service provider any email address other than the ones in the mapping.
But you're right, it does give Apple power, just the same power that has already ceded to Facebook and Google through their logins.
The reality is that companies need to understand that user's are sick and tired of being spammed, and are rightly annoyed by needing to provide every company with their email address for no good [to the user] reason.
I totally agree with your point that this is arguably a good thing, though; although I don't personally own or use any Apple products, there are fairly few services I'd want to sign up for that I'd want to ensure that they had my real email, and I'd be happy to make sharing my email address an opt-in choice rather than the default.
Apple sells me thousand dollar phones and services. Until they start selling my data to ad brokers and becoming a Google I’ll support Apple on this going forward.
Also, you may want to check the news about Apple selling data ...
Yes Apple sells ads on its AppStore and allows ads in apps. But what they sell is the chance to be in front of a billion affluent iOS owners which is different than using every bit of data from every Google property to create a profile of a user so as to target ads even more effectively or show you even more extreme videos to keep you ever more engaged a la YouTube.
There is no requirement that you only support apple sign-in, you just aren't allowed to require user's to sacrifice their privacy to use your app.
If Instagram is using https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/ with the little “log in with Facebook” button, it’s a social login. If they have their own proprietary way to do it in-house, it’s not, and not subject to Sign In With Apple.
That easy.
If it "chose provider" then yes, apple could shove in their own with the pretense of user privacy, while it is painfully obvious that it's just leveraging their appstore control to grab market.
Not even OAuth can be unambiguous. I can have a single OAuth login. That could be myself as provider, or leveraging some other provider, which could be more or less connected to my app.
The comment is saying you're free to implement your own auth mechanism using plain ol email or a phone number, but you also have to support Sign in with Apple
a. actual users have a non-FB/Google OAuth identity
b. apps have something other than google or facebook login?
I've literally never encountered an app that had anything other than google or facebook for their oauth login. The only site I ever encountered that used something different was stack overflow a decade ago, and I recall them killing it off or at least complaining about it.
I suspect that the reality is that in a regular user's experience Google and Facebook login are the only ones they've ever encountered.
Third party apps don't have to use e-mail for logins. They can use user names.
Backers of e-mail based sign-in often call it a "frictionless" method for the users to sign up. What it really is, is a frictionless method for them to collect information about their users.
But this is also specific to "social" logins - eg ones where you aren't intentionally providing your email address.
More in-depth article about it: https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-but-your-email-address-is-...
For accounts that really matter (not throwaways), someone needs to know a fair bit about the user's identity to ensure recovery works. It can be delegated (and probably should be), but that moves the identity problem rather than eliminating it.
Maybe someday we'll all have two Yubikeys (one for backup) and register with each website using them, but that's not how things work today for most users.
This "problem" has been routinely solved by free forum software and other systems for decades now.
(I still don't. My email address is public. But some people apparently do.)
- financial accounts: they would never use a third party login anyway.
- social accounts: None of them are going to let you login with third party accounts anyway.
- work accounts: Again they arent going to use social media accounts. They are going to use some type of ADFS federated account.
- My AWS account: I use Google Authenticator for that.
I lost my original Reddit account because I never gave them my email address and it was hacked. (Using a throwaway password set back when I didn't care about Reddit.) I contacted support and they shut it down, but without some other way of knowing it belonged to me, wouldn't give me my account back.
Absolutely. I have hundreds of different independent ROMs to choose from many of which are completely FOSS. I get to add or remove any app I want and don't even have Google Play services installed.
The only software I don't control on the device are the proprietary drivers and boot loader. But that's no different from my Linux desktop.
I think you are right that it will be an issue in the long term if things stay the same. Somewhere I hope this forces the other players in the field to react, to avoid Apple getting too much power.
I don’t see anyone else right now that can force app devs to support this scheme (for instance I saw countless signup pages that reject gmail’s + syntax, companies clearly don’t want to be filtered), nor that would be trusted for now by users to not abuse the situation.
Perhaps Microsoft could ? barely, as they for instance were sticking ads in their browser.
So, in a way I see Apple doing what only them can do, and hope it creates enough precedence for other minor identity managers to step in and being a more sane solution for the long run.
You are the 1st party, the service you want to use is the 2nd party and Apple is the 3rd party.
I don’t understand this complaining. Everyone who has a business has to deal with these sorts of things. That’s why people pay businesses, so we don’t have to deal with the hassle. This is the essence of running a service, such as developing apps.
Or in the best interest of Apple.
“But then Apple will be a monopoly and you’ll get screwed anyway”. Maybe. But no more than I’m already being screwed by every other cable provider, cell phone company, data broker...etc. I like Apple products. I will continue to spend too much money on them. I’d rather be screwed by Apple in exchange for some pro-user policies, than screwed by every other company that’s already screwing me in exchange for...oh right, nothing.
This is not true with Apple. They often ban superior apps to force their users to use Apple's inferior apps.
Once you understand this, you will be able to understand that this isn't pro-user at all. This is giving Apple control, and making it harder to switch in the future.
I’m not saying it’s definitely never happened, but I’d be love to read about some examples.
once apple starts gaining traction with this feature, it's positioning will inevitably change, possibly for the worse, and then we back another borse who will keep apple in check.
unlike on game of thrones, our watch never ends.
So you better log in with your own email, but of the 3, I’d rather pick Apple as the lesser evil!
There's really no such thing as checking for a "real" email address, though lots of sites do blacklist known anonymous email domains like 10minutemail. But nothing can stop you from just signing up for a new Gmail.
Apple isn't ceding anything here. They still have your email address, they have the record of your activity on the site you're accessing. They are withholding your email address from the site you're accessing, which is good for your privacy. But you make it sound like they've sacrificed something in doing that.
If google had done this, everybody would be up in arms about how google was further overreaching in their goal to gain complete control of the internet and are preventing poor little mom and pop websites from being able to meet their marketing goals.
Just because you believe the FB/G nonsense that the internet is only possible by gross violations of user privacy doesn't mean everyone else buys into it.
I'm not trying to say this is a bad thing, I love what apple's doing here. I'm just trying to push back against any suggestions that apple is giving something up. They are collecting more data about their users now than they were previously, and positioning themselves as the gatekeeper of user identity. There's every indication that they're doing this for the right reasons, and it's good for users, but it still increases their control and their stored user data.
On the other hand, Apple is tightening its control over its own ecosystems as every interaction has to go through them. Moreover, they're inhibiting anonymous usage of services as more and more things required direct or indirect verification of the user. This entices the market to normalize the demand for unique virtual identities.
They don't need to record what app or service got the alias address, and they explicitly state that they do not record any details about interaction with your service, or any emails that go through the alias. It's an explicit statement in the linked talk.
Which accounts doing what?
Businesses sending to a cloaked email?
Google provides a similar thing as an OAuth/OpenID provider. (except they track all that stuff and share the email with the site/app).
Personally, I'm fine with Apple having that kind of info as I generally trust them and also that my main concern is the same with your frustration of my email ending up in yet another leak seemingly frequently.
...up until Apple decides to change their leadership, or their business model, or the mobile market implodes and they start looking for new revenue streams, or their relationship with the US government changes, or ...
I get that as a practical matter we are forced to trust somebody somewhere eventually, but at best we should be saying that "Apple doesn't seem motivated to abuse this information for now."
However, for a company like Apple to change its stance would take a long time. Culture is sticky and, furthermore, they simply don't have the mass data collection and processing pipelines necessary for such an about face. There would be a fairly long period (my guess is years) during which consumers would be able to change providers.
I think the primary security white paper describes exactly how it works, but essentially there's a set of shared symmetric keys that are encrypted to public keys for each of your devices. Outside of the key vault path, the way a new device gets access to those keys is one of your other 2fa devices encrypt a decryption key to the new device when you approve it. The basic result is that there is no point in which the key material is transmitted unencrypted off a device.
This is only true for certain services.
But there's also a huge security benefit to apple not tracking this information: A hacker/angry-former-employee/creepy-current-employee can't access it either (eg. like the various stories we here about fb,uber,etc admins and employees spying on people).
Apple is in a unique position where they can sell hardware at profit making prices to a huge customer base. Even if we are at peak iPhone, current Apple users are not going anywhere (I tried to switch my wife to an Android phone once and it was a disaster hah). Privacy moves like Apple ID will only solidify the current user base. Best in class products like AirPods and the AppleWatch also lock users in - in a good way though.
I've noticed that since this announcement it is also pulling some stout Android users I know who have become disillusioned with how Google is slowly locking Android down. The constant bad press Google has received combined with the Apple privacy drum beat is starting to pay dividends for Apple.
I feel of all the major tech companies, Apple is way more invested in retaining their brand image.
The problem with burner address servers:
* They don't protect against fake addresses (which is why many services actually block them)
* They are much harder for regular users to use
* They're annoying to use, and fundamentally require providing your email address to yet another third party
Apple Sign-In clearly make the use of cloaking addresses much easier.
Again this still only applies to "social" logins, you're welcome to have your own login system.
I’ve personally tried personal burner email addresses for forums sign ups but the thing I found is that it is a maintenance (if that’s the correct word) nightmare. If you go with the ones that last for a brief period of time, you better guard the credentials because there’s no clicking forget password.
I’m hopeful of the feature, but even if it proves to not be that great, I’d still rather they be my identity provider over Facebook or Google so it’ll still feel like a net win.
Apple could in the future become evil after 40+ years. The other two companies are actively evil.
Do jack booted thugs come to my door to force me not to buy an Android device?
Do you really think most users were aware that they were giving up their privacy? Even if you assume they do, Google broke a contract with Apple by using a developer certification.
Google was upfront about what their app did and paid their users for that data. It's just like a Nielsen box. I had installed it on an unused tablet myself, tapping the notification to check in weekly, and collecting enough Amazon credit to pay for Prime. https://www.google.com/landing/panelresearch/
Were they clear in telling people “we can record all of your internet activities including messages, banking information”, etc.?
Yes Apple stored data on Chinese servers, but your private keys never leave your device. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
What the app was capable of collecting is different from what the app actually collected, which was clearly specified when signing up. The app is still available in the Play Store, and people still use it because nobody was surprised by what it collects. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
> Were they upfront with Apple about their use of the enterprise certificate?
Who cares? There's nothing evil about circumventing some arbitrary Apple policy to give users an app that they want.
> Yes Apple stored data on Chinese servers, but your private keys never leave your device.
Not your private keys but Apple's private keys, which gives the Chinese government unfettered access to everything Chinese users store in iCloud https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in.... Worse, the change was applied retroactively to data the users had stored in iCloud prior to the change. No other US tech company comes close in evilness.
Yes they pinky promised not to collect all of your data. So will you email me your social security number if I promise not to use it?
Who cares? There's nothing evil about circumventing some arbitrary Apple policy to give users an app that they want.
Yes there is nothing wrong with breaching a contract....
Not your private keys but Apple's private keys, which gives the Chinese government unfettered access to everything Chinese users store in iCloud https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in.... Worse, the change was applied retroactively to data the users had stored in iCloud prior to the change. No other US tech company comes close in evilness.
That’s not how public/private key pairs work and the article said no such thing.
The app is still available in the Play Store, and people still use it because nobody was surprised by what it collects. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and....
So you’re absolutely sure that every single person who downloaded the app was aware of what it was able to collect and that everyone who downloads it was legally of age able to consent to data gathering?
That's dense. If you use Apple email, they also collect your social security number if someone sends it to you, and they (and the Chinese government for Chinese users) have the ability to reset your password and gain access to any service is sign up for, despite pinky promises otherwise, and Apple's software has permission to read absolutely everything you do on your phone. In just the same way, what they have the ability to do exceeds what they tell their customers they do. What the app actually collected was specified, and there remains no evidence that they did anything more than they told the panelists.
> Yes there is nothing wrong with breaching a contract....
There is certainly nothing evil about giving users what they want in spite of the whims of a capricious (and actually evil) middleman.
> That’s not how public/private key pairs work and the article said no such thing.
Apple encrypted user's iCloud emails and iCloud data in a way that Apple still has access to for search. It is Apple's keys that matter in this case, not the user's keys for communicating with Apple.
The article said exactly such thing: "Before a switch announced in January, all encryption keys for Chinese users were stored in the U.S., which meant authorities needed to go through the U.S. legal system to request access to information. Now the situation is based on Chinese courts and a gatekeeper that’s owned by the government [emphasis added]."
So users want to install software that can intercept all of their communications? I’ve never heard someone say, “I would give up all of my privacy and install a network sniffer/key logger on my device of someone paid me*
Apple encrypted user's iCloud emails and iCloud data in a way that Apple still has access to for search. It is Apple's keys that matter in this case, not the user's keys for communicating with Apple.
That’s also not how email works. Email is not a secure communications and is never encrypted. Besides that, you don’t need to use an Apple provided email account.
The article said exactly such thing: "Before a switch announced in January, all encryption keys for Chinese users were stored in the U.S., which meant authorities needed to go through the U.S. legal system to request access to information. Now the situation is based on Chinese courts and a gatekeeper that’s owned by the government [emphasis added]."
That’s not how public/private key encryption works - despite what you read from techcrunch. The whole purpose of a public private key pair is that you (or your device) creates the key pair, you send the public key out for anyone to use. They then use the public key to encrypt a message and you keep your private key. Anyone can encrypt a message and only you can decrypt a message with your private key. Am I really explaining how public/private key encryption works on Hacker News?
I just told you that I did exactly that. If you read the reviews of the app on the Google Play Store, you will find many other users confirming that they knowingly and happily made the same deal. The Nielsen box itself contains a microphone that can hear everything in the room, and people happily sign up for the payment.
> That’s also not how email works. [Blah blah blah.]
You missed the point. The point was that Apple has the exact same access as Google from the operating system. There is a difference between what the operating system allows an app to do and what it actually does, which you have repeatedly conflated.
> That’s not how public/private key encryption works.
Now you've confused end to end encryption with public key encryption. It's a bit ridiculous that I have to explain the difference to you, but here it goes. iMessages is end to end encrypted. ICloud services like mail, drive, and docs are not. By handing over the iCloud keys to China, Apple has given the Chinese government unfettered access to this information and, by extension, all services which can be accessed using those credentials.
Now that you understand the problem, do you understand how that is evil?
In some cases, your iCloud data may be stored using third-party partners’ servers—such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform—but these partners don’t have the keys to decrypt your data stored on their servers.
If Apple is in fact lying,I’m sure a lot of government agencies would be glad to know.
https://support.apple.com/HT202303/localeselector
This is different from the (nonexistent) Chinese privacy policy.
https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/24/apple-to-m...
There's obvious pros and cons to the developer owning that communication channel, or to a middleman owning that communication channel.
What Apple is doing here is using their total control of the application distribution channel on iOS to hold apps hostage to add an option to sell users on handing Apple control, or possibly reduce their growth by forcing them to remove the other login options.
It's mildly pro-consumer, but I think it's anywhere from mildly to very developer hostile. I'm not positive it will have a sustained effect, as developers may do what they did with Facebook and detect the proxied email and ask for the real one in its place.
And Apple may very well outlaw this practice.
Sure, Apple could add even more complexity to their review process (delaying approval), or give stiff penalties to developers for working around it.
Apple's recourse to remedy a situation where a developer does not want to allow Apple to forcefully insert itself as a middle-man is primarily punitive.
Thus, as stated, this is mildly to very developer hostile.
I agree, this is some win for privacy against random rogue apps, but I don't see how Apple would secede anything.
Could you elaborate?
They obviously have a mapping of cloak address -> real address, but there's no requirement for them to have any record of which apps got which addresses.
This is not a new thing.
For example, when the iPad launched and digital versions of magazines began to be available, Apple allowed a subscriber to provide the magazine publishing house with their email address, but also required that they be allowed to refuse to provide it.
The new thing here is to give the user a way to shut off abusive spamming of an email address they have chosen to provide.
When a company blocks Mailinator, they're giving up a pretty small number of users -- those who know about Mailinator, use it, and refuse to sign up for a service that blocks it. Since Sign In with Apple is required for any iOS app that supports 3rd-party login, any company (with an app, which is mostly what this is all about anyway) that decides to block this new type of authentication will be forced to either give up all 3rd-party login options (costing them existing users who sign in this way and increasing the cost to acquire new ones), or give up their iOS app -- in either case, this probably means giving up a large number of users.
I’d like to see these:
1. Restricted to people who have associated a physical Apple device, and
2. No ability for the user to re-scramble the anonymous identifier once it is assigned to a service.
If these two criteria are met, I won’t consider it a throwaway email service.
People can and have been trivially creating “unlimited new anonymous accounts” by creating new and multiple email accounts on Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Protonmail, Tutanota and many other “free e-mail” providers. Unless you have a list of all “free” email providers around the world and are blocking them, this stand against Apple doesn’t make sense to me.
These proxy email addresses are supposed to be pseudonymous, one per apple id + app team, and are set to relay to a verified email address associated with that apple id.
Authentication will tie back to an associated physical apple device, although you can have one device associated with more than one Apple ID.
I haven’t investigated Facebook or Google SSO in depth (I always considered it a bit distasteful to participate in making these behemoths more indispensable) but if they offer some useful metadata that allows me to exclude G/FB accounts which are inauthentic or freshly created, I might look into it too.
The "real person bit" is a thing. It's the sole bit of information Apple gives for free, which is either that Apple thinks it's "highly likely" that the user is a real person (the bit's absence doesn't mean Apple thinks it's a bot, it just means Apple can't be confident it's a real person, which might simply mean Apple doesn't have enough information to make that call).
I run a large regional forum (10-15k active users per day) and our business model (such as it is) does not rely upon having as many randoms as possible getting user accounts.
We are quite selective when it comes to approving new memberships. We look at numerous subtle signals to decide whether to allow an account to be approved instantly, approved with limits, delayed or rejected. Email, ASN, browser behaviour, user's actions prior to the registration page, and numerous other things which strongly predict whether someone is an authentic new contributor, or a sock puppet/astro-turfer/troll/spammer/abuser etc.
This saves us an astronomical amount of pointless work for our moderators and makes our environment more conducive to constructive and useful contributions. (In a way it's like Hacker News comments except we're not as pedantic about chatty contributions so long as they're good natured.)
User privacy is a great thing, and most of us smaller developers have nothing against it. However, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't threaten our business continuity.
If your business is dependent on giving away user privacy to Facebook or Google unless you are doing something that integrates with them - it deserves to fail.
I don't want to know who someone really is.
I don't care how little information I get through these systems. I don't want it.
What I do want to know is that I can exclude throw-away Google/FB/Apple accounts made five minutes ago specifically to establish a new whitewashed identity on my site.
Right now I don't offer Facebook or Google login at all—specifically because I think the consequences (both privacy and the further entanglement of powerful entities) are not worth it.
For dealing with non-legit users the email address itself isn't so important. We don't ignore it—we happily reject attempts from ~10k throwaway domains and also some whole TLDs—but it's only one in a set of signals. The reason why the click-link-in-email process is so useful is mostly because it's a way for me to inject confusing and uncertain failures to the process to make it incrementally harder to game/predict our registration system. And it lets us inject plausible yet artificial slowness so that a persistent arsehole is never able to move faster than our people.
(Far more important are the subtle signals, particularly how the user behaves prior to registration. For example if a totally clean browser goes straight to the registration page it's likely to be an arsehole in a private browsing window. Legit users almost invariably browse content immediately prior to registering.)
You can still verify their email address for password resets. You send the link with the email address to the alias and Apple forwards it to the user.
But the whole purpose of using SSO is that you are not responsible for passwords - the IDP is. You should just be able to store the user id.
Besides, why use any third party identity provider if you are still managing passwords? You said that you needed an email address to send a password reset link.
Correct but irrelevant. For aiding the registration of legit users, verifying an email address is beneficial as a way for them to ensure they are able to recover their password.
Why do you need to help them recover their password if you’re using a third party?
Which would be even more reason not to sign in at all. That said I'm sure that whenever the official guidelines come out there will be something explicit about not doing so (although of course that would only apply to apps)
Nitpick: seceding = leaving a group, ceding = giving up something.
Thank you very much :p
Again, from a customer angle I’m not 100% sold on this. I don’t want to miss an email because Apple servers are down, and if Apple decides to kill an app I don’t like, I also want the ability to disagree. Separately, I want something that wouldn’t be a pain to use on non-Apple devices.
I do like the layer of indirection, but I have to imagine that someday the shareholders are going to ask "why not target ads like Google is doing" and they're not going to have a good answer.
They've also explicitly stated that they will not record any information about interaction with a service.
Based on Apple's general approach to data security, I suspect that there is no "company A got alias address Y" table. In principle all that they need is a table of alias->real. On the other hand maybe it would be useful to have such a table in the case a site gets compromised/starts selling information?
But they have stated explicitly in a public video that they will not record interactions or emails you send, so I'm sure it would be lawsuit city if the reneged on that.
The email relay address could feasibly be just a reference to that state.
You guys trust companies wayyyy too much.
I am tired of seeing my email address popping up on leaks and I don't want to rely on spam filters any more. The best spam filter out there is built into gmail, but they are no longer interested in actually preventing spam, instead they want to control it. Now Google shows me ads that look exactly like emails in my inbox, inside the iOS app.
I wasn't happy with this so I built https://idbloc.co, which is basically equivalent to the disposable email element of Sign in with Apple, now that Apple built it into their Sign In, I guess now it exists for users who don't want to or can't use Apple.