Apple announced its upcoming single sign-on service “Sign in with Apple” at WWDC last week and it’s received quite a bit of attention, including concerns about a requirement to include the Apple offering if an app offers a login with a Google or Facebook option. Today, The Verge has shared an interview with Google’s product management director covering the company’s own SSO feature, how he feels about Apple’s entrance to the space, and more.
Without surprise, Sign in with Apple was announced with a focus on privacy and security and Apple also took the opportunity to take a few jabs at Facebook and Google’s offerings. Google’s product management director, Mark Risher, told The Verge he found Apple’s claims “a little annoying” as it compared its upcoming product to the competition.
However, he went on to say that even if users are choosing Sign in with Apple or another product over Google’s SSO option, that’s better than the use of individual passwords.
He also noted that Apple’s announcement jab was an opportunity to clarify what happens when consumers use Google’s SSO feature.
Risher went on to say that gaining public trust for these sort of features is influenced by all tech companies. He noted how a previous Facebook gaffe (without naming the social media giant) was bad for all tech companies.
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We only exclusively log the moments of authentication. It’s not used for any sort of re-targeting. It’s not used for any sort of advertising. It’s not distributed anywhere. And it’s partly there for user control so that they can go back and see what’s happened. We have a page, part of our security checkup, that says, “here’s all the connected apps, and you can go and break that connection.”
He elaborated that Google is focused on “raising the bar” and more about why he was annoyed by Apple’s announcement last week.
You say, “Here’s a product that will keep you more safe,” and people say, “Hey, what are you going to do with it?” I think it’s an ecosystem problem. We have a competitor who was collecting phone numbers as a security challenge, but then allegedly also using them to build up a graph for advertising re-targeting. That’s bad for the whole ecosystem because it makes people not trust us.
Check out the full interview covering SSO here.
We try to set a very high bar. And we continue looking for places where we can refocus and re-audit our best practices and keep raising that bar. But to some degree, it’s an ecosystem problem. The worst behavior in the market is the one that everyone sees. And that’s why some of the innuendo from Apple was a little annoying, from our standpoint. Because we’re trying to really hold ourselves to a high standard.
