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Comment by axefrog | Hacker News Reader

People are used to logging into PayPal in order to send money or pay for purchases, so I would think that associating PayPal with a website login is going to be hard for a lot of people to feel comfortable with, particularly because people are so used to the PayPal logo being used with actual purchase buttons. As developers we can try to explain the difference, but ultimately I think that PayPal logo has a pre-existing connotation in most people's minds and I think that will work against them as an OpenID provider.

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This was the conclusion me and a friend came to while there last week. Talking to some of the PayPal people, they understand this is a huge hurdle they have to clear to succeed. I'm not totally convinced they'll be able to clear it, though. If I can't give out information incrementally and in a way I'm comfortable with, I'll certainly not use it.

Can't see this working for things like logging in to leave comments or play games like Twitter and Facebook identities.

Where I can see it working (and working well) is SaaS subscription services - it streamlines the signup process, provides additional data to the provider and pushes signups towards Paypal (and away from merchant account or other providers).

And that's where it's intended to be used.

Maybe it would behoove them to use the "x.com" branding for login?

Hey.. it's totally safe to key in your Paypal username and password on a completely different site with a completely different graphical profile. That right there is a standard we need to set..

Also wouldn't it be trivial to make this pretty damn privacy invasive with the segmentation feature. I mean just profile when the site switches between the enumerations and you know pretty accurately what the average spend of people signing up for your site is. Combine that with a similar procedure for transactions per year and you have a decently accurate picture of spend / year. They might as well just have numbers instead of enumerations. I would not touch this with John Holmes' penis.

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