Ebay dumps Passport

MICROSOFT'S much touted, flaunted and spun Passport service is now practically dead and buried after the last big user, Ebay dumped it this week.

Last year we reported here how Monster.com had dumped Passport and said that Vole had given up its plans for global domination with the .Net based system.

Ebay said that in late January it will stop allowing customers to sign on to its web marketplace through Passport. It will affect only a few people, said a spokesebay, as only a small percentage of eBay users regularly signed in using Passport anyway.

Microsoft had originally touted Passport as the 'gatekeeper of the web' which would allow a single sign on through its secure servers.

However, the system failed to really get off the ground and it was not helped by a security flaw found in 2003 that could have allowed crackers to hijack older Passport accounts. µ

Retailers also didn't want to sign up because they were worried about having Volish gatekeepers at the centre of online transactions and feared Microsoft might one day try to cream off payments for the service. A spokesVole vowed that Microsoft will keep Passport up and running, despite the loss of Ebay, which is one of its earliest and most important partners. Most of Passport's 200 million users are signed up to Hotmail.