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Identity/Firefox-Accounts: Difference between revisions
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→What's the difference between Persona and Firefox Accounts?
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==What's the difference between Persona and Firefox Accounts?== | ==What's the difference between Persona and Firefox Accounts?== | ||
Persona is | Persona is not intended to provide you with a new account, and it's not a new account system. Persona is a federated login protocol. You use Persona to log in to relying sites, and it's not intended that you need to "sign up" for Persona before you can use it. If you would need to sign up for anything, you would need to create an account at an IdP that supports Persona. | ||
Mozilla needs an account database to deliver a fantastic, integrated experience across all its products. Unfortunately, delivering awesome services involves some less exciting, but still important aspects, like making sure users have had a chance to inspect our terms of service and privacy policies. We must also comply with local laws and regulations, e.g., [http://www.coppa.org/ COPPA]. It would be inconvenient for users to have to verify a terms of service, a privacy policy, and COPPA at each individual Mozilla service. We believe that users should only have to inspect our terms of service, privacy policy, and go through COPPA verification '''once''' for all our services. Firefox Accounts enables us to do that. | One *huge* confusing point about Persona today is a service called the "Persona Fallback", which serves as a proxy IdP if your actual IdP doesn't support Persona (or isn't bridged), which just about every IdP except for Google and Yahoo. In this case, you currently have to sign up for a "Persona Fallback Account" (i.e. choose a password and verify your email) to use Persona. | ||
But a Persona Fallback Account is not a Persona Account, it's not the long term vision of Persona, and that's not supposed to be the happy path of the Persona login experience. | |||
More importantly, for the purposes of this question, a Persona Fallback Account is definitely not a Firefox Account. | |||
So why Firefox Accounts and what will one do? | |||
Mozilla needs an account database to deliver a fantastic, integrated experience across all its products. Unfortunately, delivering awesome services involves some less exciting, but still important aspects, like making sure users have had a chance to inspect our terms of service and privacy policies. We must also comply with local laws and regulations, e.g., [http://www.coppa.org/ COPPA]. It would be inconvenient for users to have to verify a terms of service, a privacy policy, and COPPA at each individual Mozilla service. We believe that users should only have to inspect our terms of service, privacy policy, and go through COPPA verification '''once''' for all our services. Firefox Accounts enables us to do that. One we get the basics down and enable single sign-on for relying Mozilla Services with your Firefox Account, we hope integrate Firefox Accounts with Persona on the Web and Firefox user agents to make logging in everywhere as painless as it should be. | |||
== What information does Firefox Accounts store about the user? Can I use it to store user data for my application or service? == | == What information does Firefox Accounts store about the user? Can I use it to store user data for my application or service? == | ||