> When presented with different ways to sign on to sites, you can choose Google or Microsoft instead of Facebook. > Yes, it’s possible those companies could be

> When presented with different ways to sign on to sites, you can choose Google or Microsoft instead of Facebook. > Yes, it’s possible those companies could be hacked one day, too. After all, Yahoo was hacked, as was LinkedIn, as was Equifax. But at this moment, a sign-on service by Google or Microsoft has one big advantage over Facebook’s: Those companies did not lose control of 50 million people’s accounts, and Facebook did. This argument recommending Google or Microsoft is bad because it rests on the fact that there was a breach on Facebook. Centralized authentication mechanisms are bad because they magnify the issues when breaches happen. At the same time, relying on each site/service to implement authentication securely and also maintain it securely is a huge task — something I believe the vast majority of SaaS platforms don’t focus on. Just like it’s a good idea to use different passwords on different systems, one should avoid using centralized authentication systems like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. This comes at the cost of convenience though, because you can take this to the extreme of having unique login credentials (user/password) for each service. Using a password manager helps on this front to keep it easier to follow such an approach. This is a serious topic that more people should be educated about.