Handing off Authentication to Google

A few months ago we wrote a post about out our authentication processes at Wing and how we arrived at our authentication solution after months of research.

After much deliberation, internally, we have decided that Google is the most well equiped provider in the world at handling authentication of users. Google successfully manages and secures the largest user database in the world, and are constantly ahead of the curve in the space of authentication. Google’s Authentication products have been years in the making with years of documented research from global experts in the field of user authentication.

All of these factors considered, Wing has, over the course of this weekend, completed a migration of our proprietary user authentication services to Google’s Authentication services. These services use the same technologies as Google’s own Authentication systems.

This does not mean that Google has access to any of your data from Wing. In fact, Google knows absolutely nothing about you when using Wing.

The way it works, is that Google helps us generate a cryptographically unique code that associates your user ID, devices, and identity with Wing together, and verifies this information upon Sign In using Google’s proprietary security technologies. If Google’s Authentication services deems the sign in attempt as suspicious, it will incur two factor authentication to assist us to verify your identity. The only data Google needs to make these determinations, are those codes that they uniquely generate, and your sign in request. If all appears OK a, Google will respond with a positive acknowledgement, which will invoke Wing to unlock to your account.

Wing is committed to keeping our users’ identities, data, and personal information completely secure, and will always make decisions that put users’ privacy & well being above all else.

Trusting an assistant can be hard, Wing wants to make that decision easy.