OAuth is a standard for sharing user account authentication data across various platforms. The name of this technology is quite literal - it's called Open Authorization. OAuth is an open standard that has been in development since 2006 when software engineer Blaine Cook worked on Twitter's OpenID implementation. Google joined in 2007, and OAuth 1.0 was released in 2010. Since then, many tech companies, including Facebook (Meta) and Microsoft, as well as smaller platforms, have adopted the open standard. OAuth 2.0 was published in 2012 and has been the most widely used open standard for user account federation ever since.