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Simon Willison

I'm trying to think of an OAuth API that dishes out tokens which effectively let you _spend money on behalf of your users_ and I can't think of any - OAuth is great for "grant this app access to data that I want to share", but "spend money on my behalf" is a whole other ball game

6 comments
Simon Willison

I guess there's a version of this that could work: it's OAuth but users get to set a spending limit of e.g. $1 (maybe with the authenticating app suggesting what that limit should be)

Simon Willison

Mike Taylor on Twitter pointed out that advertising apps in Google/Facebook world often use OAuth to gain the ability to spend advertising money on behalf of users without getting into trouble - I've added that counter-example as a note to my blog post here: simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/24/

Emelia 👸🏻

@simon I think there's a new I-D for OAuth that does or can do something like this..

Ian

@simon Like an allowance system? Interesting idea.

Mikołaj Hołysz

@simon IMO this would work if and only if the user had to explicitly input a dollar value to grant.

Darrel Miller

@simon Both Azure APIs and Microsoft Graph use OAuth2 JWT tokens to enable a user to do things that cost money, but in both cases the token needs to be issued by Microsoft's identity provider. It might be possible to use a Federated Identity to incur those costs too, but there plenty of controls in place for the subscription owner.

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