Apple wants to help protect your data and privacy with a new service allowing you to sign up to third-party apps and websites.
You know these “sign in with Facebook, Google or Twitter” buttons? While they make it extremely easy to sign up for online services, they almost always end up providing a ton of your private data to those same services. Apple wants to stop that, by offering its own “sign in with Apple” button, ironically.
“Now this can be convenient, but it also can come at the cost of your privacy — your personal information sometimes gets shared behind the scenes and these logins can be used to track you,” said Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi.
Apple says it took a different approach to the problem by proposing to authenticate users using Face ID on their iPhone without turning over any data to a third-party service.
Federighi explained that when apps ask for names and email addresses — typically auto-populated from a one-click login from a social networking site — you can still provide them if they wish. But when you don’t want to provide your real email address to protect your privacy, Apple will auto-generate a random “relay” email address that hides your real email address.
“That’s good news because we each get a unique random address, and this means you can disable any one of them at anytime when you’re tired of hearing from that app,” said Federighi.
Should we trust Apple more than Facebook or Google? We probably should.
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