Simon Willison’s Weblog

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1 item tagged “shameful”

2008

Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts. And they’re using the password anti-pattern to get them! Despite both Yahoo! and Hotmail (and Google themselves; not sure about AOL) offering a safe, OAuth-style API for retrieving contacts without asking for a password. This HAS to be a communications failure somewhere within Google. Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they’re the ones most likely to be targetted by phishers. Shameful.

# 15th September 2008, 10:39 am / shameful, google, passwordantipattern, oauth, aol, yahoo, hotmail, ffs, security, phishing