Charts show how Facebook took over your online identity

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Getty

• Facebook suffered the biggest hack in its history last
  week.
• The breach was potentially huge, impacting not just
  Facebook profiles but also sites where users use their Facebook
  credentials to log in like Tinder or Spotify.
• Facebook said there was no evidence to show third-party
  sites were affected, but if they were, the scale of the problem
  could be enormous.
• Facebook has come to dominate social logins, squeezing
  the likes of Yahoo and Twitter out of the market — as these
  charts show.

Facebook revealed the worst security breach in its history on
Friday. Hackers, the company confirmed, had taken advantage of
multiple bugs in its code, potentially gaining access to 50
million users’ full social media profiles.

This was extremely bad news, but it only got worse. Facebook
later confessed that the problem could be much bigger, because
the nature of the vulnerabilities potentially also gave hackers
access to third-party services like Tinder, Airbnb, and Spotify.

Lots of people use Facebook to log into other sites to avoid the
hassle of remembering lots of passwords, and it’s possible that
affected users also had information stolen from these accounts.

On Tuesday night,
Facebook said there was no evidence that hackers had used
stolen “tokens” to access these third-party accounts. That is not
the same as saying that it definitively did not happen, and
several third-party sites such as Spotify and Tinder are
conducting their own investigations. Facebook hasn’t provided
much more detail while it continues its investigation.

It turns out Facebook is the most popular third-party login
mechanism for other sites, according to statistics shared with
Business Insider by Janrain, an identity management firm. And
it’s only become more popular over time.

This chart shows which services people used to log into
other sites in 2011:

Business Insider/Janrain

Facebook is pretty dominant, but people are also using lots of
other services like Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live
(represented by the yellow block). Everyone else is a small
player.

This chart shows how things have changed by
2018:

Business
Insider/Janrain

Facebook has cemented its dominance. Together with Google, it
commands 94% of the market, leaving Yahoo, Twitter, and others
trailing in the dust.

Part of the reason for the change is that more people are doing
everyday tasks online, and there are a lot of websites that now
require a login.

In 2011, you probably ordered a pizza over the phone. Now you do
it online and, because every business is desperate to know who
its customers are, you need to create an account. It’s much
easier to log in using your Facebook than remember a whole new
account name and password, especially for sites you visit
infrequently.

Facebook and Google realised that the battle for online identity
would become an important one, and each pitched to own your
online persona. The advantage for consumers was that both firms
were big, trusted providers who removed the need to remember
passwords. The advantage for Facebook and Google was ever more
data about what you were doing when you weren’t on Facebook or
Google.

Most of the time, people are happy about the trade-off. But even
big, multi-billion dollar companies are not completely infallible
when it comes to security. And every now and then, that 94%
market share looks like a liability, not a win.