Apple introduced a new single sign-on (or SSO) tool known as “Sign In with Apple,” developed to authenticate customers to apps though sharing a minimum of private information with third parties. It’s a direct competitor to easier solutions supplied by Facebook and Google, which had been known as out by name on stage, and element of Apple’s broader work to brand itself as a privacy-conscious option to these corporations. The new technique will be offered across apps as properly as on the net.
As described onstage by Apple software chief Craig Federighi, users would encounter the service as a simple sign-in button, presented as an alternative to setting up a persistent username and password for a given service. But where Google and Facebook use those buttons to link you to your broader advertising profile, Apple’s service is designed to give the minimum necessary data.
The system does not even share your email, but sends each app to a different redirect email address managed by Apple. With a different redirect for each app, it would be much harder for third parties to correlate information by comparing emails. And when a user wants to disconnect from an app, disconnecting the connection is disconnected.
It is unclear how or when Apple plans to make money with the system. But presenting a new sign-on tool can cause serious problems for Google and Facebook, who often use SSO systems to bundle their own code and API calls to external apps, gathering a wealth of ad trace data. For everyone who makes the switch, most of that data rests with Apple, which oversees the tool, but managers bet that you trust Apple with the data, more than advertising-funded companies such as Google and Facebook.
It is part of a broader push to Apple services that were discussed during the March Show Time event. During that event, new subscription services were offered for TV, games and news, as well as the Apple Card in finance, a remarkable shift from the company’s traditional focus on hardware.
