==TL;DR== 1. Multiple identities gives our users control over the presentation of their online selves and allow them to get their social tasks done 2. Google can't quite get multiple identities to work properly across a wide range of services 3. Both of these facts strengthen the argument that we need a way to deal with multiple online identities effectively, even when it breaks the site terms (in Facebook's case) and even when the site already supports it natively (in Google's case)
==Google and multiple identities== > What I see is: they don't want to mix google accounts. Then this works just > with google accounts, what about other websites? > About gmail, personally I don't use this feature: can you have 2 accounts > opened at the same time or you can switch between them? Initially, I was sceptical of this use case. Two things changed my mind: 1. A lot of people I have talked to wanted to open two Gmail mailboxes, but are unaware that it's possible to do so. In that case, they would use another browser or Private Browsing. 2. Google's multiple sign-in implementation doesn't work reliably across its services. It's very tricky to get right, and has lots of breakages. Consider this scenario: * Open a new tab and sign into Gmail * Open another tab and sign into Gmail with another account * Open another tab and open Google Drive Which account will Google Drive open? Account A because it was set as the first default, or account B because it's the latest one opened? The answer, as it turned out, is "it depends": * Drive will use the last (current) account * Plus will use the first (default) account * In certain cases, Google's sign-in cookie only lets you sign in with one account at a time (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/179235). In that case, Drive will ask you to sign out of every other account before accessing it. ==Facebook and multiple identities== > What about other websites (second question)? For instance: personal > facebook and a business account. Same for other social networks. I was also sceptical of this at first. Facebook Terms forbid creating more than one personal account. By doing site isolation, won't we encourage people to break ToS? As it turned out, people have used Facebook in many unexpected ways: * It's against the Facebook Terms to use your personal account to represent something other than yourself (e.g. business). But when you try to comply by converting your personal account into a public page, all your friends, posts and photos are gone. * Some sites encourage opening separate profiles for separate uses: one is personal and used to talk to friends and families, the other one is professional and given away to employers and written in front of business cards. * Even if you want to use Facebook as one personality, Facebook doesn't have sophisticated tools to segregate who sees your posts and interactions. What if you don't want one set of friends to see that you've posted something to the other sets of friends? You can restrict it, but you'd have to create a list for every single group of friends you have. In short, multiple Facebook identities might not be officially sanctioned, but it's the way that some people have molded the service to fit their needs. _______________________________________________ dev-privacy mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-privacy
