{"id":1879,"date":"2014-02-16T13:28:13","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T21:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/?p=1879"},"modified":"2014-03-11T11:45:29","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T18:45:29","slug":"on-mozillas-persona-post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/on-mozillas-persona-post-mortem\/","title":{"rendered":"On Mozilla’s Persona Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a great summary on the Mozilla wiki<\/a> about what did and didn’t work about Persona<\/a>, Mozilla’s attempt at a new identity protocol for the web. (Given the existence of that page, I’m not sure the project continues to be actively pursued?<\/strike> Techcrunch reports<\/a> that Persona is dead.)<\/p>\n

Having been in the middle of the last major attempt to solve the identity problem on the web aka OpenID<\/a> \u2014 well, as long as it looked like it was actually going somewhere \u2014 I was always puzzled why Mozilla thought they would be able to produce a better outcome. Chances are that the identity team at Mozilla simply did not know about the OpenID experience; this is certainly the impression I got every time I talked to somebody on their team. Some of the predictions they made were extremely unlikely, and there seemed to be a great lack of understanding for how possible adopters (e.g. a website with a login button) would evaluate their business case.<\/p>\n

Among the many good points, for me the most salient point on that page is this:<\/p>\n

We looked at Facebook Connect as our main competitor, but we can’t offer the same incentives (access to user data).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Duh. In fact, the way Persona positioned itself, it explicitly promised that it was going to be more privacy-protecting than anything else, aka “we won’t give access to user data.” (I predicted<\/a> exactly that outcome last year.)<\/p>\n

If the business model of your customer is spying on their users<\/a>, why would you expect them to adopt a technology that makes that harder?<\/p>\n

So. I learned this about decentralized identity on the web:<\/p>\n