There are a few web sites out there (Flickr being one of them) where if you wanted to sign up a new account, there is the option to use your existing Facebook account to do it with.
I strongly recommend against using a Facebook login to sign up for anything with because at some point you may regret it.
The reason why it’s an awful idea to use a Facebook account to sign up with is because if you get locked out of your Facebook account, you’re screwed.
Right now Facebook is on a rampage and deleting 80+ million fake accounts left and right. Do you honestly believe that every single fake account they delete will be accomplished without deleting legitimate accounts by mistake?
When it comes to a centralized account, meaning the account you have where everything starts, it should be your primary email address. Using your Facebook login as your primary centralized account is just a bad idea because it’s almost too easy to get locked out of it.
Let’s say someone on your Facebook friend list has a grudge against you for whatever reason. If that someone flags what you post there as spam/”inappropriate” enough times on the Facebook system, you will be locked out. It will happen. It may take a while, but one day you’ll go to login to your FB account and it won’t work. You’re locked out. And now eveything you used your FB account to sign up for won’t work anymore.
Good luck trying to get your FB account unlocked. Big internet companies like Facebook absolutely do not care about you whatsoever and never did.
When it comes to signing up for web sites, use your email address. If the site doesn’t allow that and requires Facebook to use it, don’t use that site.
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Personally I’m more against using FB (et. al.) accounts to sign up for other sites for the reason that, it feels like the other sites are copping out. It’s like they’re admitting, we’re not responsible enough to keep your user data, so we’re going to outsource that service to someone else.
It may seem appealing to the average user to be encouraged to use the same account information everywhere (contrast with what every tech will tell you, which is the opposite), but it’s just not proper.
This may be a bad analogy, but it feels like if your employer were to say, hey we don’t use our own keys, so let us just modify your own housekey to fit our doors, we promise it will be safe and it will still work in your house. That may be true, but my house key is a very personal item. I don’t care how safe the procedure is, this is my key, you have no right to use it, and you shouldn’t need to ask in the first place.
These places want your traffic, but not bad enough to support their own user system, something everyone else has done themselves since user/password systems were invented. I still feel like I’m not quite putting my finger on the issue, but there it is.
This is all of course, in addition to the security, privacy, and potential lockout concerns.
I agree – if a site requires Facebook (or anything similar) I don’t use that site. There is NO way I would sign up or otherwise visit or put any information on facebook (or anything similar). It is beyond me how anyone can possibly think that is safe. I get along fine without being a TWIT(ter) and putting personal info “out there.”