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"all their arguments apply to all third-party sign-ons" No they don't. Other sign-on options don't obfuscate the email address. They are likely removing FB lo

"all their arguments apply to all third-party sign-ons" No they don't. Other sign-on options don't obfuscate the email address. They are likely removing FB login as otherwise their next app update will be rejected by Apple for supporting third party login but not Apple login.

monadic2 6y ago
Surely you can’t hide your email from apple itself.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You can't; the design behind Sign in with Apple is that you've already trusted them with your email as you're using it to buy apps from the App Store.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Trusting them to protect your arbitrary data is a completely different scenario; there’s just more concentrated risk (i.e. your identity is just gone when Apple gets taken).
scarlac 6y ago
It used to be true that during a Facebook Connect session the user was asked if they wanted to share their email or not. I faintly remember you could even choose a proxy fb e-mail aka "fake email". Did they remove that feature?
- necovek 6y ago
  A party in OAuth authentication can request some obligatory information, and if email is part of it, you won't be able to deselect it. In general, sites use email as an indication of a unique, real person. I imagine most of them do not really care about it afterwards, which is why the SSO systems even work (though, they can demand an email too).
  - joshuaissac 6y ago
    It was not that Facebook allowed the user to deselect the e-mail address from what would be shared. Rather, it allowed them to randomly generate an e-mail address to share with the other party. I think messages sent to this address were forwarded to the user's Facebook inbox. And to answer scarlac's question, yes, they removed this feature a very long time ago.
    - necovek 6y ago
      Ah, thanks for the correction! :)
AnonC 6y ago
Obfuscation of the email address is an explicit choice by the user when using Sign in with Apple. It’s not something forced by the service. If users are choosing to do that, it says something about the lack of trust the users have with whatever they’re signing up for.
- rattray 6y ago
  There's two kinds of "obfuscation" at play with Sign In With Apple. One is true obfuscation - "hide my email". That would be a poor choice for use with any app you hope to have an ongoing relationship with, I'd think. The other is just the use of iCloud email addresses, detailed in the post, which seemed like a very good and concerning point. It's also much less likely to be a problem with FB or Google login.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Your primary iCloud email address is meant to just be your main email address, including non-Apple email addresses.
    - imron 6y ago
      "Meant to" doesn't mean "is", and even if 99% of people do what they are "meant to", that still leaves millions of people doing it the "wrong" way.
      - Firehawke 6y ago
        Yep. I rarely run into people who use their iCloud email, and that goes for both the technically inclined and the average users. Locking things down like this seems to have some serious negatives that Apple needs to reconsider their approach for.
        gemvox 6y ago
        But you don't need to have your iCloud mail set as the primary mail for your AppleID. You don't even need to create an iCloud mail when you create an iCloud/AppleID account, it's an optional step. I recently created another iCloud test account and it's also not shoved in your face or anything, it's a small little button called "Don't have an email address?" somewhere. So I don't even really understand how people get into this situation.
rswail 6y ago
They don't obfuscate the email address you use with them. I don't share my "real" email address with Facebook. My Google account isn't my main account, it's a throwaway I use for things that require email to sign up. This is a general problem for all OAuth IdPs.
- imron 6y ago
  > I don't share my "real" email address with Facebook. Don't worry, they know it anyway.
  - sky_rw 6y ago
    My gf googled a Mexican restaurant neither of us had been too on her phone and when we got in my truck literally 5 minutes later android auto maps on my phone suggested it as a destination. If they can do this, they can get your other email addresses.
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      Wait, why? If both of you have your location info turned on then this seems like a trivial correlation to make, especially since both of these are Google's own services.
      - necovek 6y ago
        Esp so since Android Auto is just your phone on your car's screen.
      - sky_rw 6y ago
        You don't find this creepy at all? She googles something on her phone. Gets near me, and my phone suggests driving to the location she googled? We aren't on the same account or anything. Google just assumed that I wanted to go where she wanted to go and shared her private searches with me. What if she had gotten in the car and planned parenthood had come up as suggestion?
dcow 6y ago
Also other login providers haven't done massively stupid things like not authenticate the actual email address when issuing tokens... like common who in their right mind would want to adopt a new service with a piss poor security reputation for a critical security sensitive leg of their stack?!
jobu 6y ago
That may be a reason in the future, but they did specifically mention a couple really good reasons to dump Facebook login now: > "That’s become even more true as time goes on, since Facebook constantly seems to be upping the ante with creepy privacy practices. We use the Facebook SDK to provide login functionality, and every new release of the SDK seems to add new tracking options that are turned on by default, which we have to take action to disable. Furthermore, the Facebook SDK has quality problems, and recently caused a huge number of iOS apps to crash due to a misconfigured server."
kevsim 6y ago
Additionally many other 3rd party login systems have been around much longer than Sign in with Apple, which was another strike against Apple for the author.
msh 6y ago
As a user I can't see why any random app needs to know my true email address.
- randomchars 6y ago
  From the article: > If a customer contacts us asking for support, and we need to look up something in their account, typically we can just ask them for the email address on their account. But with “Hide My Email” that wouldn’t be easily possible, because the customer would have to figure out the privaterelay.appleid.com email address used for their account. > Furthermore, if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address. (And that certainly won’t be easy to find if you no longer have an iOS device.) And then they’d have to create a password with us, since they wouldn’t be able to sign in using Sign in with Apple. > Finally, for a service like AnyList, which is heavily focused on sharing lists with other people, the “Hide My Email” option greatly complicates collaboration. Typically, customers share a list by typing in the email address of the person they want to share with. If that person already has an account, the list is instantly shared. But with the “Hide My Email” option, your spouse or friends obviously won’t know your privaterelay.appleid.com email address, so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account. At that point, you’ll get an email from us asking you to create an account. If you accidentally create a new account, it won’t include the work you’ve done in your existing account created via Sign in with Apple. And if you manage not to make that mistake, then there would be a link between your email address and the account you created with Sign in with Apple, negating the value of hiding your email address.
  - lilyball 6y ago
    For the first point, the app can explicitly tell the user what their login is, or otherwise assign some unique identifier the user can use when contacting support. The app can also offer to contact support for them, which can pre-fill the user identifier. For the second, that’s entirely the user’s choice. Your app can also allow them to associate a new email address for this purpose (which strikes me as exactly what you actually want since the real unstated motivation here is getting the user’s email). For the third, don’t make me type in someone’s email. The exact same issue as described happens if they have multiple email addresses too. Just let me use my OS’s sharing mechanism to send a special link that they can open to establish the sharing connection. An invite to share, as it were. Not only does that solve the problem, it’s significantly more user-friendly.
necovek 6y ago
Nor do they demand you implement their SSO system if you use any SSO or your app would not be available. That's a pretty big argument specifically against Apple!

monadic2 6y ago

Surely you can’t hide your email from apple itself.

saagarjha 6y ago
You can't; the design behind Sign in with Apple is that you've already trusted them with your email as you're using it to buy apps from the App Store.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Trusting them to protect your arbitrary data is a completely different scenario; there’s just more concentrated risk (i.e. your identity is just gone when Apple gets taken).

scarlac 6y ago

It used to be true that during a Facebook Connect session the user was asked if they wanted to share their email or not. I faintly remember you could even choose a proxy fb e-mail aka "fake email". Did they remove that feature?

necovek 6y ago
A party in OAuth authentication can request some obligatory information, and if email is part of it, you won't be able to deselect it. In general, sites use email as an indication of a unique, real person. I imagine most of them do not really care about it afterwards, which is why the SSO systems even work (though, they can demand an email too).
- joshuaissac 6y ago
  It was not that Facebook allowed the user to deselect the e-mail address from what would be shared. Rather, it allowed them to randomly generate an e-mail address to share with the other party. I think messages sent to this address were forwarded to the user's Facebook inbox. And to answer scarlac's question, yes, they removed this feature a very long time ago.
  - necovek 6y ago
    Ah, thanks for the correction! :)

AnonC 6y ago

Obfuscation of the email address is an explicit choice by the user when using Sign in with Apple. It’s not something forced by the service. If users are choosing to do that, it says something about the lack of trust the users have with whatever they’re signing up for.

rattray 6y ago
There's two kinds of "obfuscation" at play with Sign In With Apple. One is true obfuscation - "hide my email". That would be a poor choice for use with any app you hope to have an ongoing relationship with, I'd think. The other is just the use of iCloud email addresses, detailed in the post, which seemed like a very good and concerning point. It's also much less likely to be a problem with FB or Google login.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Your primary iCloud email address is meant to just be your main email address, including non-Apple email addresses.
  - imron 6y ago
    "Meant to" doesn't mean "is", and even if 99% of people do what they are "meant to", that still leaves millions of people doing it the "wrong" way.
    - Firehawke 6y ago
      Yep. I rarely run into people who use their iCloud email, and that goes for both the technically inclined and the average users. Locking things down like this seems to have some serious negatives that Apple needs to reconsider their approach for.
      - gemvox 6y ago
        But you don't need to have your iCloud mail set as the primary mail for your AppleID. You don't even need to create an iCloud mail when you create an iCloud/AppleID account, it's an optional step. I recently created another iCloud test account and it's also not shoved in your face or anything, it's a small little button called "Don't have an email address?" somewhere. So I don't even really understand how people get into this situation.

rswail 6y ago

They don't obfuscate the email address you use with them. I don't share my "real" email address with Facebook. My Google account isn't my main account, it's a throwaway I use for things that require email to sign up. This is a general problem for all OAuth IdPs.

imron 6y ago
> I don't share my "real" email address with Facebook. Don't worry, they know it anyway.
- sky_rw 6y ago
  My gf googled a Mexican restaurant neither of us had been too on her phone and when we got in my truck literally 5 minutes later android auto maps on my phone suggested it as a destination. If they can do this, they can get your other email addresses.
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    Wait, why? If both of you have your location info turned on then this seems like a trivial correlation to make, especially since both of these are Google's own services.
    - necovek 6y ago
      Esp so since Android Auto is just your phone on your car's screen.
    - sky_rw 6y ago
      You don't find this creepy at all? She googles something on her phone. Gets near me, and my phone suggests driving to the location she googled? We aren't on the same account or anything. Google just assumed that I wanted to go where she wanted to go and shared her private searches with me. What if she had gotten in the car and planned parenthood had come up as suggestion?

dcow 6y ago

Also other login providers haven't done massively stupid things like not authenticate the actual email address when issuing tokens... like common who in their right mind would want to adopt a new service with a piss poor security reputation for a critical security sensitive leg of their stack?!

jobu 6y ago

That may be a reason in the future, but they did specifically mention a couple really good reasons to dump Facebook login now: > "That’s become even more true as time goes on, since Facebook constantly seems to be upping the ante with creepy privacy practices. We use the Facebook SDK to provide login functionality, and every new release of the SDK seems to add new tracking options that are turned on by default, which we have to take action to disable. Furthermore, the Facebook SDK has quality problems, and recently caused a huge number of iOS apps to crash due to a misconfigured server."

kevsim 6y ago

Additionally many other 3rd party login systems have been around much longer than Sign in with Apple, which was another strike against Apple for the author.

msh 6y ago

As a user I can't see why any random app needs to know my true email address.

randomchars 6y ago
From the article: > If a customer contacts us asking for support, and we need to look up something in their account, typically we can just ask them for the email address on their account. But with “Hide My Email” that wouldn’t be easily possible, because the customer would have to figure out the privaterelay.appleid.com email address used for their account. > Furthermore, if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address. (And that certainly won’t be easy to find if you no longer have an iOS device.) And then they’d have to create a password with us, since they wouldn’t be able to sign in using Sign in with Apple. > Finally, for a service like AnyList, which is heavily focused on sharing lists with other people, the “Hide My Email” option greatly complicates collaboration. Typically, customers share a list by typing in the email address of the person they want to share with. If that person already has an account, the list is instantly shared. But with the “Hide My Email” option, your spouse or friends obviously won’t know your privaterelay.appleid.com email address, so when they enter your email address, our systems will believe that you don’t have an account. At that point, you’ll get an email from us asking you to create an account. If you accidentally create a new account, it won’t include the work you’ve done in your existing account created via Sign in with Apple. And if you manage not to make that mistake, then there would be a link between your email address and the account you created with Sign in with Apple, negating the value of hiding your email address.
- lilyball 6y ago
  For the first point, the app can explicitly tell the user what their login is, or otherwise assign some unique identifier the user can use when contacting support. The app can also offer to contact support for them, which can pre-fill the user identifier. For the second, that’s entirely the user’s choice. Your app can also allow them to associate a new email address for this purpose (which strikes me as exactly what you actually want since the real unstated motivation here is getting the user’s email). For the third, don’t make me type in someone’s email. The exact same issue as described happens if they have multiple email addresses too. Just let me use my OS’s sharing mechanism to send a special link that they can open to establish the sharing connection. An invite to share, as it were. Not only does that solve the problem, it’s significantly more user-friendly.

necovek 6y ago

Nor do they demand you implement their SSO system if you use any SSO or your app would not be available. That's a pretty big argument specifically against Apple!