This article was published on August 8, 2013

Mozilla launches Persona Identity Bridge for Gmail, lets users sign in with their existing account credentials


Mozilla launches Persona Identity Bridge for Gmail, lets users sign in with their existing account credentials

Mozilla today announced the Persona Identity Bridge for Gmail users. If you have a Google account, this means you can now sign into Persona-powered websites with your existing credentials.

Here’s the feature in action (notice you don’t need to create a new password):

The best part is of course Mozilla’s pledge to its users. “Persona remains committed to privacy: Gmail users can sign into sites with Persona, but Google can’t track which sites they sign into,” Mozilla Pesrona engineer Dan Callahan promises.

The Gmail bridge is available right now, meaning all Persona-enabled sites leverage it automatically. If you want to test it out yourself, Mozilla recommends signing into Webmaker.

With Gmail and Yahoo both on board, Mozilla calculates Persona now natively supports more than 700,000,000 active email users. Put another way, that covers somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent of people accessing most North American websites.

Now all the company needs to do is get Outlook.com on board, and it will easily be covering the larger majority of email users. Once that’s done, and not before, it will be worth watching to see Persona’s adoption rate compared to the competition.

For those who don’t know, Persona is Mozilla’s answer to social networking logins offered by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Developers can implement the service for authentication across smartphones, tablets, and desktop browsers.

The company revealed the BrowserID service in February 2012 and then launched a beta of the renamed Persona in September 2012. The company also updated the tool’s privacy policy in February 2013 to emphasize what data is collected (very little), and what isn’t.

See also – Mozilla: Moving Persona servers outside the US to escape surveillance won’t work, but changing the law will and Mozilla launches Webmaker Badges, linked to Persona, so you can brag about your mad coding skillz

Top Image Credit: Chris Chidsey

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