OAuth is a standard way of a user allowing access to some of their data from one website to another.
When you use "Login with Battle.net" it's the same technology that powers "Login with Facebook" or "Login with Twitter" buttons that you may have seen in other places on the internet. Our websites sends you to Battle.net where you would log in as normal (including using your authenticator). When you type in your username and password, notice that you are on Battle.net websites and it's secure (via the lock icon in your brower's address bar). You are logging in with your credentials to Battle.net, not our site.
What happens afterword is rather technical, but basicaly you are shown a screen where you grant our site access to see your list of wow characters. The data about your wow characters is the same public data that appears on your armory page. So by logging in with battle.net, our site gets this information about you:
- Your Battle.net account ID
- Your Battle.net battle tag
- If you give us permission: your list of wow characters (across all wow accounts tied to this battle.net account)
- If you give us permission: your list of Sc2 accounts (our website doesn't ask for this, so it doesn't ask you to grant permission)
That's it. No real name, or email information is exposed at all (if Battle.net ever did add name/email to our oauth it would have to ask you for permission to expose that data first, just like with the wow character list). My site never sees any of your Battle.net credentials at all. In the end Battle.net tells my site that the user currently using it is the one that owns the above information and that's it.
For more information here is:
- The original blog post announcing this feature
- Lifehacker article explaining oauth
- The Battle.net guide on developing with oauth
- The wikipedia page about oauth
- For the really brave, the oauth 2.0 spec
Have fun! Feel free to message me with any questions about any of this.
Christopher Giroir
Email: [email protected]
Aim: kelsin5
GTalk: [email protected]
Kelsin, Emacs, Critsy, Kitlyn on Bronzebeard US