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eBay Loses Advocate for Passwordless Entry

eBay
eBay Loses Advocate for Passwordless Entry

Did you know there was a person in charge of “identity” at eBay? As Head of Identity (literally his job title), Ashish Jain was responsible for providing customers and third-party developers with the technology for secure access to eBay’s website. Or, in tech jargon, for “delivering seamless, flexible, and secure cross-platform experience for more than 180 million eBay customers and third-party developers through its Identity, Risk, and Trust framework.”

However, this week, Jain was named Chief Product Officer at Arkose Labs, which offers clients fraud-fighting solutions such as its “long term solutions against account takeover.”

A week before his departure from eBay, Jain had posted about his efforts to make the marketplace passwordless to offer a more secure site. “Our underlying problem statement is the same as most sites today – Passwords are bad,” he wrote. “Results in fraud, account take over (ATO), additional support calls, user abandonment etc.”

The announcement of Jain’s departure was a reminder that this year marks the 10-year anniversary of eBay’s announcement of its “Commerce Identity” solution that was supposed to allow shoppers to sign-in to websites with a single identity tied to PayPal. It would include their shopping profile so that retailers could show them targeted offers.

eBay had made the pie-in-the-sky announcement at its X.Commerce Innovate Developers Conference in October 2011, but the initiative quickly faded away, and just 3 years later, in 2014, eBay was forced to require all users to change their passwords after a data breach.

You can read what Jain had to say about eBay’s current efforts on his post on LinkedIn last week. And you can compare it to eBay’s thoughts in 2018 about a passwordless approach on its Tech blog.

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Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.

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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.

2 thoughts on “eBay Loses Advocate for Passwordless Entry”

  1. “A week before his departure from eBay, Jain had posted about his efforts to make the marketplace passwordless to offer a more secure site. “Our underlying problem statement is the same as most sites today – Passwords are bad,” he wrote. ”

    ok jain, if you say so.

  2. “Did you know there was a person in charge of “identity” at eBay?”

    Did you know that there’s lawyers in charge of stealing from sellers at eBay?

    Did you know that there’s a useless guy that’s swears he’s in charge of “Seller Protection “ at eBay?

    Did you know there a few guys that are in charge of the insanely massive employee perks over at eBay ?

    Did you know that there’s are people in charge of running a bar over at eBay?

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