Do you share your user idenities between platforms?
The scenario is that you have 3 distinct websites each with authentication so you want to sign up users to each of those sites.
It's hard work and expensive to get a user to sign up once, let alone three times.
So, do you share identities between your sites?
If so, how do you achieve it?
If not, why not? What problems have you encountered?
It seems to me there is a potential prize available for the 'consortium' owner of mutliple brands that is able to say to their valued user of service A, if you head over to service B you'll find you can setup an account there in one click rather than having to sign up again from fresh.
Be great to get your insights.
Thanks
Hi,
I have done this, not in the exact scenario you describe but in a multi tenant environment. A lot of people on my team argued against it (in favour of requiring one login per tenant) because it went counter to their preconceptions. But I overruled them and the result was amazing, better than I expected. So much easier for everyone to use and so much less time spent mucking around between environments.
I don’t often use my veto power but the theory I applied to make the decision is that authentication is supposed to identify a person, not a role. If you have the same person using different services then it is still the same person. Authentication sits above the application layer rather than within it; we know this is true because we have FB, G and Apple login services, among others. Also, don’t make the world more complicated.
So yeah I would totally recommend in favour, but I would make sure that you have permissions in place so someone signing up for service A doesn’t automatically get service B. I’d get consent from the user before letting them access service B and I wouldn’t set up any data in B until consent was provided.
This shouldn’t be tricky; convenience and privacy can live together happily with nuts a little thought. But a privacy breach in service B that exposes details captured through A would look very bad (even worse) for you.
Good luck
Mark
Very insightful, thanks. Also, the person should know that the two, (or more), services are from the same provider. If they trust and like the one, and understand the reason why it would be beneficial to port over parts of their profile, then they should be able to trust the others. I believe this is big for legal and health services.
Edit: I'm looking to enter that Mozilla hackathon and would like to have this feature in my demo.
Had the same question..following this thread ☝️