Social login enables website visitors to authenticate to any website by using their existing credentials, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, etc. As a result, users do not have to initially register to your website in order to verify their identity.

Today more and more websites employ social login, driven by the fact that the old site specific registration and password system is no longer scalable.

Social login has a variety of benefits:

• Increases opt-in rates by making the visitor’s sign in process easier, reduces form abandonment
• Increase conversion rate as users use existing Social Network logins rather than filling out long registration pages
• Improves data collection by capturing a visitor’s profile and storing it in your database
• Strengthens the social perception of your brand
• Opportunity for increased engagement as users can quickly identify which one of their friends has also visited that same website
• More accurate contextual information as first time users information can be used to match relevant content, products and ads
• Increases accuracy of data

What does all this have to do with privacy?

Social login gives businesses access to extraordinarily rich data from their customers, this includes a user’s email age, location, interests, hobbies, purchasing habits, cultural tastes, and even political views.

In the following chart done by Silverpop, you can review the poplar data available by the most popular networks:

Important questions:

1. Which social networks should I offer?, you can use what you have learned from studying the social sharing habits of your customers, select the social networks that is more appealing to your target market and the ones you have more engagement rates.

2. How do I collect key data that I do not get from a social network?, one option would be to use progressive forms to collect the data later. Yet another would be to set up your form so that visitors who log in with Twitter, for instance, would be automatically routed to a second form asking for an email address.

Few resources from social networks:

1. Sign in with LinkedIn
2. Sign in with Facebook
3. Sign in with Google
4. Sign in with Twitter
5. Gygya consolidates various social network APIs into a single API that is easy to work with and saves significant development time