Hi, I'm the author of the piece of code that allows you logging in via various external services to vaadin.com, so all this is kind of my fault. Let me try to explain the situation.
The first time you try to log in with, say, Google, we don't have any records of you. So we ask that service provider (Google in this case) for some information (I'll come back to the Contacts issue in a while). We are interested in the following data: user id, first name, last name, something suitable for a screen name and email. Then the user is redirected back to our server, with a form to give a bit more information about themselves, with as much as the service told about you pre-filled for you. Once the form is submitted, a Liferay user is created with the information given, and we link the user id given by the service Liferay user that was created. So, basically, we actually only use the service provider's user id. Everything else is just gravy; if the service says your name is John, we pre-fill your name as John to the register form. But if you change your name to Jack, you will be known as Jack to us, and no trace of the original "John" will be saved to our databases. Now, back to the "Contacts" issue. At the time of implementation, I tried to search a suitable API from Google to give what we needed. Unlike Twitter and Facebook (them being singular services,) Google is a mass of disparate services. I was unable to find anything generic - I needed to pick an OAuth (OpenID was out of the question, unfortunately) service both gave us the information we needed (basically an id - additional personal data would only be for the user's own convenience). But we also needed to be sure that every Google user would have that service enabled. So, the most suitable service that I found was Contacts. The fact that Google warns you that we get access to all your contacts is unfortunate in the sense that we are not interested in your contacts. There is no way for us to communicate to Google that we only need your user id from that service. That being said, I have now found https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2Login and am in the process of converting the login to use that in the future. This is a service specifically built to serve this kind of information: basic profile information. All of the above applies also to Twitter and Facebook - we are only interested in the user id that links a particular person to a user in our databases. Facebook seems to have changed the way their API works, and has started to provide too much information that we do nothing with. Once I'm done converting the Google bit, I'm going to fiddle around the Facebook settings to make sure that we ask for as little as needed. On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 9:33:34 PM UTC+2, maticpetek wrote: > > Dear Joonas, > We have couple discussion in this forum about given email address to > access survey result. Some people see this as interference between > commercial interest of Vaadin and community. I don't think so and I also > express my opinion. If some company invest their time & resources to > prepare survey and present results - this is good for all community and you > can have my email to send me product updates. Ok, I also think you have > cool product and I want information from your company. > But could you please explain me why you need access to my Google > Contacts information if I login with my Google Account? Or to my friends > lists from Facebook if I login with Facebook connect? What will list of my > personal friends, family members and business partners have to do with GWT > wishes voting system? Frankly speaking, I think this si very bad sign for > feature customers (like I am) for you company product & services. And as I > say - you have cool product and I really wish you all the best. > > Regards, > Matic > ------------------ > GWT stuff twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/gwtstuff > > > > On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 7:45:59 PM UTC+1, Joonas Lehtinen wrote: >> >> We just published all of the 2600+ wishes you guys added to the Future of >> GWT survey on most important things needed in GWT. Take a look: >> >> https://vaadin.com/gwt/report-2012/wishlist >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-web-toolkit/-/ABEUnq5MkDwJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
