Mozilla Persona is a decentralized authentication system for the web based on the open BrowserID protocol prototyped by Mozilla.
Persona was launched in July 2011 and shares some of its goals with some similar authentication systems like OpenID or Facebook Connect, but it is different in several ways:
- it uses email addresses as identifiers
- it is more focused on privacy
- is intended to be fully integrated in the browser.
The privacy goal is motivated by the fact that the identity provider does not know which website the user is identifying. It was first released in July 2011 and fully deployed by Mozilla on its own websites in January 2012.
