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Facebook revealed the worst security breach in its history on Friday. The company confirmed that hackers had taken advantage of several bugs in its code to potentially access the complete social media profiles of 50 million users.
It was very bad news, but it was getting worse. Facebook later confessed that the problem could be much bigger, because the nature of the vulnerabilities also allowed hackers to access third-party services such as Tinder, Airbnb, and Spotify.
Many people use Facebook to connect to other sites in order to avoid having to memorize many passwords. It is also possible that affected information is stolen from the affected users.
On Tuesday night, Facebook said there was no evidence that hackers had used stolen "tokens" to access these third-party accounts. This is not the same as saying that this has definitely not happened, and several third-party sites, such as Spotify and Tinder, are conducting their own investigations. Facebook has not provided much more details as he continues his investigation.
It turns out that Facebook is the most popular third-party login mechanism for other sites, according to statistics shared with Business Insider by Janrain, an identity management company. And it has become more and more popular with time.
This graph shows the services users were using to connect to other sites in 2011:
Facebook is rather dominant, but users also use many other services such as Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Windows Live (represented by the yellow block). Everyone is a little player.
This graph shows how things have changed in 2018:
Facebook has cemented its dominance. With Google, he controls 94% of the market, leaving Yahoo, Twitter and others on the run.
One of the reasons for this change is that more and more people are performing daily tasks online and that many websites now require an identifier.
In 2011, you probably ordered a pizza over the phone. Now you do it online and, as every company desperately needs to know who its customers are, you need to create an account. It's much easier to sign in with Facebook than to remind you of a new account name and password, especially for sites you rarely visit.
Facebook and Google understood that the battle for online identity was going to become an important issue, and everyone was proposing to own their identity online. The benefit to consumers was that both companies were trusted big suppliers who eliminated the need to remember passwords. The advantage for Facebook and Google was to have more and more data on what you were doing when you were not on Facebook or Google.
Most of the time, people are happy with the compromise. But even the big multi-billion dollar companies are not completely infallible in terms of security. And from time to time, this 94% market share appears as a liability and not a victory.
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