509
Why? (quokk.au)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
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How hard is it to implement email verification?

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[–] 247 points 4 months ago (26 children)

How hard is it to implement email verification?

Harder, actually.

That's the point of OAuth, which is what you're seeing there.

The idea is that you're you and you have a... google account. This shitty little website doesn't want to be responsible for you login details, because those can get stolen. Maybe they contain an email address, which is a problem. Software needs to be updated, it's all a big. They don't want to touch anything in terms of security that identifies you as you.

Maybe all the website does is save your favorite pepe memes. They don't need anything else from you, but they still need to have something to get a user id and make sure nobody messes with your pepe meme collection. That's where this system comes in, because the rest of website becomes significantly easier. They don't need to store anything personally identifying, all they get is an ID and they can connect it with your pepes.

The only downside to OAuth is, as you can also see, that it's corpos you don't want to trust that are offering it.

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  • [–] 34 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    While I get that, it is still unfortunate that no open-source, trusted variant can be part of the usual ways.

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  • [–] 28 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    There's really no reason something like that couldn't exist. A foundation would just have to decide to dedicate the resources to it.

    The issue is it would have to gain significant adoption in order for web admins to think to include it. This list here is actually a lot larger than you usually see. It's often just the big 2 or 3.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    That's... mostly because of popularity and it depends on whether some service is offering OAuth and if the website in question is using THAT identity provider.

    For example, mastodon is technically offering it.

    https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16221

    but this is the docs page:

    https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/sso/

    So the answer in this case is to just grow, promote and support what we're already doing: fediverse stuff.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Yeah, some of the same reason everyone uses stripe or PayPal for payment systems. If the site itself handles the cc info it holds all the liability, and has to pass rigorous POC testing and compliance.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    I have no account with the above. I wouldn't make one for being able to use another service.

    No idea what the product is here, but I guess I'm not their target audience. Which is fine.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Just have a spam account?

    spamspamspamspam2026@gmail.com for e.g.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    That's the OP's point - logging in by email is not an option.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    A gmail account is a Google account.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    I said email, not gmail.

    There are thousands and thousands of email providers. Gmail is only one of them.

    And even if your email is a gmail account, you may not want to associate your google account with the service, just the email address.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Most users outside of Lemmy dgaf about corpos if it saves them having to type in an email address on their phone and get it right and then go to their email and then hit refresh a few times before going back and hitting send again and then checking their spam folder

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    But most oauth implementations use the user email as identifier so they get the email anyway

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    All the smarter ones don't because an email can change, your google account unique id will not, that's the purpose of account IDs.

    I won't deny that many people/websites probably do use email though. Which is bad. But I can't deny that that probably is what is happening.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Well there is that, but it also gets them potentially a whole bunch of extra info about you, and lets them link you up with data from other sites they may own or share data with.

    It does tell you what you're about to give them, but 25+ years in the industry has taught me only too well that nobody ever reads anything ever.

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