The internet isn't becoming a dangerous place to be; it is already a dangerous place to be.

I have a new appreciation of sites that allow you to log in using Apple login thanks to a letter I received from a doctor's office Saturday. The letter reported a data breach at their office, which exposed everything needed to steal your identification and offering a year of free ID protection including scanning the dark web as compensation. Since the service was free, I signed up, and a few hours later received my first report and it was an eye-opener! 😳

The report revealed, my identity has been exposed one to three times each year since 2013 by data breaches at companies I do business with via the internet. 🤬 The recommended safety measure in each data breach is changing the password for every account that uses that email address as a login ID even if they all use different passwords. As a matter of routine security, I do refresh passwords on the most vulnerable accounts periodically and I no longer re-use a password. Still, I have close to a hundred logins that use the same email address as the ID and changing all of those every time there is a data breach somewhere just isn't going to happen.

Although, to the best of my knowledge, I have not been directly targeted yet, it was at this point, I realized the benefit of logging in everywhere with Apple. Apple login provides multiple layers of hiding and protection and in the end the site receives a one-time, time-limited, password and hidden ID. A lot of sites offer Google or Facebook logon, but I haven't had a Facebook account in years, and I actively try to hide where I browse from Google so those won't do. For a while now, I have urged everyone to be cautious on the web. Effective today, I am urging the online sites I do business with to offer Apple logon.

More disturbing than all those breaches is the fact that it sounds as if NONE of the entities that were targeted ever informed you.

I hope none of them had critical, security endangering info.

You mean other than name, address, telephone number, date of birth, social-security-number, spouse's name, children's names? There were a couple I had been warned about, but those involved credit card numbers. As near as I can figure out you get notified if your credit card or health information is exposed. Or in the case of a VERY ethical company/institution/individual, which I have reason to believe triggered the whole event in the first place.

Apparently the number of data breaches has risen sharply since Covid-19 came on the scene. (Too many people hackers in isolation with nothing else to occupy their minds?) But are not making the news either because Covid-19 and Trump's serial failures are sucking up all the air time or because the breaches don't involve enough people to be "newsworthy".

I note that you're urging the sites you do business with to adopt Apple ID login. Any idea of the general trend with sites moving toward Apple ID logins? Is it fairly widespread?

There is a recent trend toward third party logins and in my experience Apple is offered as one of the options on 1/2 to 2/3 of those sites, and that percentage is growing.

How do you know if a site allows Apple ID login? Do you get some sort of notice at the site?

What OS on iMac is required to use it?

Purely coincidentally, I received a mailing from NYC today, and when I followed the included link I saw this.

I believe this is the first time I've ever seen an Apple login option.

More: The Apple login option was a surprising one, because the mailing states that "To access NYC TAP [I] must use Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 10+ on a PC running Windows 7 or higher," and I, of course, satisfy neither condotion.

This morning I saw that the NY Times has one. At their log-in page, the reader gets:

Log into your account

(In a plain box) Continue with Google
(In a plain box) Continue with Facebook
(In a plain box) Continue with Apple

Or use your email (which requires a password)

So, I guess I've answered my own question.

Catalina is the only one I have tried it with.